by James Franco
“What’s up, little bitch?” he said.
I wasn’t smaller than him, I was just weaker. “Fuck you, little bitch,” I said back. But I said it quietly into my shoulder, and after he passed.
But then, behind me, he said, “Did you say something?”
I stopped and turned, and he was walking right at me. I started backing away.
“Did you say something, faggot?” he said.
Then I put my hands in front of my face, but he got through them with his fist, and hit me. I felt his knuckle connect with my cheekbone, sharp. And then I fell, because I was surprised, and because I tripped over a bush.
I was on the ground, and there were a few people watching from far away, but no one came over.
“You are going to be dead before you know it,” I said.
I was surprised I had said that, but I didn’t show that I was surprised.
Brent looked surprised too; his droopy eye opened a little more, and then it went down again and he got evil.
“Are you fucking high right now, faggot?” he said, leaning over me. I was holding my cheek, and maybe even crying a little. I had fallen in an area for plants; there was sharp tanbark under my hand and some shitty juniper bushes.
The people in the distance were just standing and watching.
Then I got loud through my tears. “I’m high on how fucking stupid you are!” I said. “I mean, you are soooo dumb, Too $hort! Brent too short, too dumb, too many pimples, shitface! What a fucking idiot!” I started laughing up at his face. The gun was giving me power, even though I didn’t have it yet. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” I laughed. “It’s, like, why aren’t you dead yet?”
Brent’s dumb face just looked so stupid at that point, and it looked like he was trying to straighten his left eyeball, under the lazy lid, but that he just couldn’t, and I laughed even more because it was twitching. “Hey, twitchy eye, why don’t you just die of being a fucking shitbag?”
I thought this was a pretty good line.
Brent reached down for the front of my shirt, but I curled up into a ball, so he couldn’t grab me. He roared like a boar, long and angry, and then he started stomping on my ribs. Quick, hard stomps. My ribs bent, and my lungs were jolted, and there was a sucking-in sound. I stayed rolled up and he stomped me. Then there were some shouts from afar, and Brent was gone.
On Saturday night I went to get the gun.
Cubberley was a high school that had been shut down two decades before. It was famous because some of the Grateful Dead had gone there forty years ago, but now it was a big empty campus where adult classes met and where children’s sports teams played on the weekends. There were weeds in all the cracks of the arcade floors, and dead vines on the walls. I had been forced to play a lot of sports there when I was younger, so I knew the place well.
I rode my bike there because I was too young to drive. It was about four miles from my house. Teague and I were supposed to meet at the outdoor auditorium. I rode fast and the cold air on my face felt like I was riding through ghosts.
When I got to the school, I walked my bike down the hallway. On the walls, there were light fixtures every so often, which shone faint orange behind thick rippled plastic. They still kept the lights on every night, lighting nothing, for no one.
I walked past the gym, where I had played basketball when I was ten. The double doors had a chain through the handles, and there was a padlock hanging in the center. I had a memory flash of being small, in an oversized jersey, playing badly and hating myself. Then I was at the outdoor theater.
It had a stone stage and a grassy area for the audience. I was at the lip of the grassy part, at the far end from the stage. The moon lit up the place.
I left my bike at the edge of the grass and walked down the small declination toward the stage. The grass came up in uneven patches, and the dew soaked through the top of my black Converses, and through my socks to my feet.
* * *
I couldn’t see anyone.
I thought about Brent coming out from the dark and shooting me.
If he knew I wanted to kill him, he would kill me first.
In the old days, you could duel.
Emotions have been around forever.
I wish I had a girlfriend. Or someone.
There was no one. I was in the middle of the grassy area. The stage was there, with its jagged lip of broken stone, looking spiritual in the moonlight.
I felt that weight on me, the weight of stone, and it was familiar. I was weak, and stupid, and wimpy, and I had no opinions, and I was a bad talker, and I didn’t know how to make friends, and I had big ears, and an ugly nose, and my hair was ’fro-y, and my dick, and my stomach, and my mind were all bad.
But then a weird thing happened. While I stood there and waited for my gun, Brent changed a little in my mind. For a second, it seemed like he was just another guy. Brent was ugly, and he had human needs, and he probably had a bunch of disappointments in life. I suppose being so close to the gun, almost having it, made me think about things in a new way. Brent had problems, and he had skin, and he had a mom, and one day he would die too.
If I shot him, it wouldn’t really matter. There would be more people like him. Deer get shot all the time. Deer blood and deer guts all over the forest floor. Blood in the leaves, breathing slowing down. And then gone.
Brent would be forgotten too.
“Hey.”
I turned. There was someone standing in a little alcove in the sidewall of the theater.
He had been watching me. It was Teague. There was cement behind him and above him and he was in shadow so it was hard to see his eyes.
There was another guy on the cement above us, but I couldn’t really see him. I could only tell that he was big and white.
Teague was my height, and handsome. He wore a black parka but I could tell that he was skinny from his face and neck. He had curly brown hair cut pretty short.
He looked like he was about to laugh, but he didn’t laugh, and because I couldn’t really see his eyes, I was confused about what he was feeling. Maybe nothing.
“Here’s the shit,” said Teague, and he handed me a wrinkled paper bag. He didn’t stop looking at me while I took the bag.
The bag was heavy. I looked inside, and there was a black handgun at the bottom.
“Take it out,” he said.
“Nah, I’m cool,” I said. “Looks good.”
“You don’t want to check it out?” he said.
“Nah, we’re good,” I said. “Three fifty-seven, right?”
“It’s a Glock,” he said. There was a sound from above, like scraping.
“I thought you said a three fifty-seven?”
“Glock’s better,” he said.
“Right, cool,” I said.
“Three-hun,” he told me.
“Oh, right.” I took out a folded envelope from my back pocket and handed it to him. I had been saving for a car.
He counted the money and then put it in his back pocket.
“Nice doing business with you,” he said, and walked out. He met his friend at the end of the grass, and they turned the corner down the hall with the orange lights and were gone.
The bag just looked like a lunch bag, so I carried it casually. I rode my bike home, and the bag swung under my handlebars. I was humming a little bit. Some tune. I saw my hand on my handlebars, gripping the handgrip and the top of the bag. I stopped humming and heard the air all around me, and my bike whirring below.
And you know how you can’t see your face? The closest you can see is the tip of your nose, if you cross your eyes. But I wanted to look at myself right then, to see this guy coasting down the sidewalk with a gun, going somewhere.
Then the bag split and the gun clattered onto the cement. I skidded to a stop and turned around to get it. It was lying on the sidewalk in front of someone’s lawn. A black gun on the sidewalk. It wasn’t metal. It was plastic. It was a squirt gun, full of water. For a second I was sure of it, but no,
it was a real gun. I picked it up. I didn’t know how to check if it was okay. There was a button on the side of the grip that I pressed and the clip popped out in my hand. It was heavy and full of bullets.
I popped the clip back in.
Then I pointed the gun at the house I was in front of. It was an Eichler house, low and boxy, with a garage door out front—like my house, but orange and white. I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. There was a loud burst and then the house was there, but even more there because it had just been shot.
A neighbor’s dog barked, and I took off on my bike with the gun clutched to my chest.
Two weeks later was the Battle of the Bands. There were seven local bands from the various high schools, and I thought it was funny and fitting that it was in the gym at Cubberley.
I went to hear my friend Barry play. Barry was in a band called Headless Tom, I guess after Washington Irving and Mark Twain. Barry’s brother was in the band, with two other pothead Mormons.
Most of the kids there were the alternative crowd from my school and other schools, but there were some jocks there too.
I stood to the side and watched. The gun was heavy in my jacket pocket.
Barry’s band went on third.
Their first song was called “The Quick and the Dead,” because those are the last words in the Mormon Bible. It is a song about friends who have died.
Across the pit I saw Teague swaying like a stalk of wheat. He looked like he was laughing, but I knew that he wasn’t.
Then I saw Brent Baucher. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. It was not his kind of music. He needed his Too $hort, “So You Want to Be a Gangster.”
I saw Mr. Case in the corner, one of the chaperones. It was really late to drive back to Angels Camp.
The next song was a fast song called “Bricklayer.” Everyone got into it, even the jocks, and a small mosh pit formed. I got into it too. In the pit, bodies hit each other and there was sweat. It was tight and hot. I was behind Brent but he didn’t know. I jumped and our bodies collided. And again, in the hot, sweaty circle.
From the side, Mr. Case watched with his crossed eyes.
Jack-O’
I sit in the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s old DeVille. It is night out and cool. Me and Joe, we just sit.
We’re out in front of the Unified Palo Alto School District office, a dead one-story building where old people work. I think of all the boring English teachers I have ever had, and I think they were all born in this building.
We sit here because it’s dark, and there are no lights outside this building. We’re stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and we’re drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.
My window is cracked, just a bit, and the air plays on my forehead. I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunging Grandpa’s old blue boat through the cement guardrail. The sculpted posts crumbling about me and Grandpa’s blue machine: a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release: a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away.
Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color. Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gap.
There is not much to talk about with Joe because he’s such a moron. I don’t know what he thinks he is, or why he thinks he exists. I guess in some people’s lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing. In the olden days you were born into it, all decisions made, and you farmed until you died, or cleaned the royal toilets.
I guess they didn’t have toilets. Just stuck their asses out and shat in the moat. But someone had to wash out the hole.
“If you lived in the olden times, what would you do?” I ask Joe.
Joe has to think about it. He is large, and his weight spreads from his belly across the seat, like it was a plastic sack full of liquid, rolling in layers upon itself.
“Which olden times?” he asks, and it’s like a boar’s grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.
“Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.”
Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.
“I’d be the king,” he says.
“You can’t be the king,” I say. “No one is king. That’s like winning the lottery.”
“If I went back, I’d be king. And I’d fuck every virgin in the kingdom.”
“You can’t be king, asshole. You can’t even be duke. The fact that you even said that shows you’re not royalty. You’re a peasant.”
“Whenever people time travel, they go back and they are friends with the king, or they are the king.”
“Because those are stories. When people tell stories, they’re always about the king; it’s Aristotle crap. But it’s not real.”
“Neither is time travel.”
“There are very few kings, and you certainly wouldn’t be one of them.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, Joe, you’re an idiot.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know,” I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.
“If you were king, I’d kill myself,” I say.
Joe sucks off his cigarette. It looks like the point of a golf tee in his fat, clenched paw.
He looks at me and the blue shadow-smoke drifts over the gate of his teeth like fog over a graveyard.
“Then you better die, mo’fucker, cuz I’m the king round these parts.”
He smiles with rotten teeth like busted shingles, all climbing over each other, and I think, Why don’t you get some braces, motherfucker, and brush those dang things? But I don’t really think about that too much because I’m thinking about something else, or at least getting ready to do something else, or already doing…
And before I even know it, or can enjoy the new look on Joe’s face, like a blubbery peekaboo face, so surprised, I’m driving us right toward the vague beige shadow-filled wall, and I can only see and hear Joe’s voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second I’m with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then it’s gone because there’s the metal sound so loud and it’s how I had always planned it to be, crunching, and a jerk, and the front of my head fills with the cold hollow sinus pain, the surprise punch in the nose that takes you back to childhood, and there’s an immediate link to every other time you ever had your nose hit, by a ball, by a head, by your own knee, and after the surprise, it doesn’t go away; but I’m still there and the tires behind me are screeching because my foot is still on the gas, and the car has gone a ways into the wall but it ain’t going any farther, and I look over at fat shit, and there is blood rolling out of a slice in his forehead, and some blood coming out of his mouth, and I think that it’s from the head gash until I see one of those teeth is now a black gap and he looks like a fat something-awful: hockey-player-pumpkin-cartoon-shithead, and he says, “Why the fuck did you do that, Manuel?”
I laugh like crazy, a laughter that explodes like popcorn, because he looks so fucking silly, and because my name isn’t even close to Manuel. That’s his brother’s name.
Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan.
But I did paint those swirls, because I drove Grandpa’s car into the wall.
For six months I drove around town with that busted car. The front was smashed. I replaced the light
s, but they were crooked and looked in different directions like Peter Falk’s glass eye and real eye. I didn’t care, and the cops didn’t catch me or pull me over. For a while.
I’m at school and when I pass Joe in the breezeway, I say, “Hey, Jack-O’, we doing this thing tonight?” because we’re friends again.
“Yeah,” he says. “Hector has the good shit.”
Everyone calls Joe “Jack-O’” now because he didn’t get a replacement tooth. He kept the hole because he thinks it makes him unique, and he stopped being mad at me after he figured out he wanted the gap, and then we would laugh about me being so crazy driving into the wall, and I smile when people bring it up, but really it was a failure. If only I had driven right through into some other reality, but the DeVille was sturdy, and yes, it was busted in the front, but not really as much as it could have been, and not so much that my parents got too suspicious when I said that another car backed into me.
Now me and Jack-O’ are driving down the dark 280 freeway. Me and fat boy cruising. And I think about that missing tooth, and that gap, and how there was never a gap in that place before, and about three dimensions, and how the gap was on the inside of his mouth unless he opened his mouth, and how things, shapes, folded in on themselves, and four dimensions, and if time is variable, then how do I vary it, and why do I want to? Because everything just focuses in on me and I hate it.
“If you were an Egyptian, what would you do?” I ask Joe.
“Don’t start this shit again, Michael.”
“Remember when you called me Manuel?”
“I never called you Manuel, idiot. I would be Pharaoh.”
“No, you’re too fat. Pharaohs are skinny,” I say.
“I don’t want to be an Egyptian: pyramids and mummies and shit, and sand, and all that, fuck it, it’s boring, man. I would be an Aztec, or a Mayan, like my peeps, and I’d cut your fucking heart out, homes.”
Joe is Mexican. His skin is an ashy light brown and his lashes are heavier than mine, and he has short, fat eyebrows and shit brown eyes, and thick hair that flops about his fat pumpkin head.
