I should tell you now, I don't believe in God. I believe in April Morgan's little white panties. I caught a look at them at tennis camp this summer. I believe in other girls, too, but mostly April Morgan.
So it's not like I had converted or anything, but school was three days away and I had never had a girlfriend. I believed in April Morgan, so I prayed.
"God? Um, I don't know if you're there. Look, today is my sixteenth birthday. All I want this year is April Morgan. You know her, right? And, I mean, if you're up there then you must have invented sex, so…"
This is stupid, I thought. You know how sometimes you can just tell something isn't going to work and you give up halfway through? This was one of those times.
I stood and banged my head on the light that hangs from my ceiling, then sat at my desk. I always bang my head on that light because I'm tall. Tall and skinny. My dad says I look like Kevin McHale when he was younger.
So I sat down and powered on my twenty-seven inch flatscreen and G5 quad-core. My friends watch porn all the time, but once I saw April Morgan at tennis camp, I decided to be faithful to her. I know it sounds stupid, but you'll understand when you see her.
I opened my desk drawer and took out two little round silver boxes. Are they still called boxes if they're metal? Anyway, I took a bump of Adderall, then one of Ritalin to smooth it out.
Don't be so surprised. If you'd had access to the drugs kids do today, you would have done the same thing. They say that Adderall produces the same chemical effect as amphetamines, but you're not gonna see me buying meth off some white trash loser from Southie. And my parents borrow each other's meds all the time, so they're never gonna notice if one or two go missing.
So I opened up Google and typed in "how to pray." I found a bunch of advice—have a conversation with God, a sincere heart, be humble and sincere. All that shit.
I know I seem like a spoiled-rich dirtball, but I'm really not. I'm smart as hell. I can tell you the difference between semantics and syntactics, or explain how the downfall of the Third Reich had more to do with economics than the American military. But the truth is, I don't give a shit about any of that. I only care about April Morgan and those panties. If you were ever sixteen, you'd understand.
Anyway, on page two of the search results I saw it: www.Celebrity-Prayers.net.
"Thank God," I said, as I clicked the link.
* * *
I scanned the site and knew right away that this was the answer. The headline across the top read: In Need? Have Your Favorite Celebrity Pray for You
Here's the idea. You pick a celebrity, fill out a form, then the site contacts the celebrity, who has already signed up as a prayer provider. The celebrity can accept or reject your prayer request. If he accepts, you pay the site, the site pays the celebrity a cut, and the celebrity prays for you.
Awesome, right?
So I'm reading through the list of celebrities—mostly d-listers like Santana Bryant, former defensive end for the Patriots, Bunny Hops, some eighties porn star, and Sally Manning, a drummer from some seventies band I'd never heard of—and that's when the bumps hit me.
Adderall makes everything awesome, like your brain is a fire that's breathing love into the world. And big, like that love expands out in all directions. You know how they say that the universe is still expanding from the big bang? You ever imagine the way the edge of the universe feels? Adderall makes you feel like that.
And Ritalin makes things sharp and focused. So, imagine you're the edge of the universe, getting bigger and bigger, holding in all the planets, all the stars, and all the space in between. But then you can see it all with a clear, calm, crispness. Now you understand why I do it, right?
So, the bumps hit me, I looked back at the site, and then I saw him: Tyson Whittiker.
If you haven't heard of him, you haven't been watching enough reruns. He starred on Fresh Faces, that mid-nineties show about the black family that moves into the rich neighborhood in L.A. He was the kid with the catch phrases. He took famous lines from movies and put the word freeesh in there.
Pretty stupid, I know, but he came up with some good ones. Say hello to my freeesh face. Scarface. Or, my favorite: You can't handle the freeesh face. Watching a nine-year-old black kid do Jack Nicholson never gets old.
I know it sounds lame. A rich white kid, sitting in a wood-paneled room, surrounded by bookshelves full of Saussure, Barthes, and Merleau-Ponty, watching reruns of a cheesy show that was on before he was born. I mean, the production values alone make the whole thing comical. But I didn't care. There was something about that kid. He just had this…thing. He seemed happy. Like he was invisible to himself.
Don't laugh. You'll get it soon.
So I stared at his photo for a minute, then clicked to look at the costs. Turns out, there were a bunch of options.
Package A was one remote prayer for $250. Package B was a week of daily prayers for $1,000. Package C was bundled with package B and included a video recording of the celebrity praying for you: $1,500. The packages went all the way up to F, which was an in-person prayer meeting.
My mind wobbled a bit and the screen got fuzzy, so I took another bump, this time just the Adderall. I heard my mom laughing by the pool. She and my dad are cool. They leave me alone and don't pay enough attention to notice when I borrow their pills.
Package F said "inquire for pricing," so I filled in my information and clicked "submit."
I turned off my computer and lay on my bed. I looked at the clock. School starts in sixty-two hours, I thought. Those fuckers better be quick.
* * *
The next part, I only found out later. But stories are supposed to have a structure, so here it is.
Tyson was walking out the door of his shitty apartment in Brooklyn Heights when his phone beeped.
He turned back in and looked around for the beep. His apartment was small, dark, and littered with Burger King wrappers and cigarette butts.
I mean, this guy had a fucked-up life. Plus, he'd gotten fat. I guess that happens when your career peaks when you're nine and you have to spend the rest of your life doing ridiculous celebrity appearances and getting booed off the stage at lame stand-up clubs.
So he found his phone and looked at his email:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Prayer Request
Dear Mr. Whittiker,
We are pleased to inform you that your prayers have been requested at an in-person session in Cambridge, MA. The requested prayer date is Tuesday, September 3, 2013. The agreed upon price for the appearance is $4,500, of which you will receive 70%, or $3,150. To accept this prayer request, click here.
Sincerely,
Your Team at Celebrity-Prayers.net
Seriously, if you want to know how far a man has fallen, just look at where he gets his email.
From what he told me later, he read the email while sitting on his fucked-up couch. You know, threadbare, springs coming out of the cushions. Then he rummaged around on the coffee table, found a cigarette, and lit it. He told me later that he had smoked half of it before he realized it was covered in ketchup. I mean, how fucked up is that?
But I guess he must have accepted the prayer request, because I woke up around midnight when my phone and computer dinged at the same moment. I looked down at my phone—iPhone 5, by the way—and read: "Your prayer request has been accepted."
I could go on about this part. I could tell you how I paid the $4,500 plus airfare without telling my parents, how they bitched about it for five minutes, then went back to their offices. I could say how I arranged for a taxi to pick him up at the airport, how I stayed up until two the next morning watching Fresh Faces reruns. But I'd rather get to the good part, when Tyson showed up.
* * *
The doorbell rang. It was late Tuesday morning, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Last day of summer. Both parents at work.
Anyway, I was sitting at the comput
er when the doorbell rang. I ran out of my room, but stopped at the top of the stairs when I saw him through the glass in the top half of the door.
He didn't look like I thought he would. On the website, they showed a picture of him from when he was still a star. Now, he was old and fat. I mean, I guess he was only in his late twenties, but he looked older.
I walked down the stairs and opened the door. Tyson smelled like you'd burned a whole pack of cigarettes inside a Goodwill. I mean, who still smokes cigarettes?
Anyway, while I'm smelling him, he put on a stern face and said, "I'll be back…with my freeesh face." Then he looked right into my eyes and broke into a big smile. "Tyson Whittiker," he said. "You Devon?"
"Um, yeah." I shook his hand. "Come in."
The next hour or two were really awkward, and I'd rather not talk about them. Long story short, we sat by the pool, he drank a glass of my dad's vodka, and I pretended to go to the bathroom and popped a couple expired Vicodin from the time my mom herniated a disc. Then he asked me what I wanted to pray about.
The vicodin hadn't kicked in yet and I wished I'd snorted it.
"Girls," I said. "I mean, I guess."
I stared at the leaves drifting into the pool. Fall had come early and fall in Cambridge is like an explosion in a fancy leaf factory.
"Girls?"
"Yeah."
He put the vodka on the glass table, shaped like a yin-yang. "How old are you?" he asked.
"Sixteen. Sunday was my birthday."
"Cool," he said. "Happy birthday."
We both sat for a minute.
Finally, he looked over at me and smiled. "Bet you got one girl in particular in mind."
Vicodin is good if you're looking to mellow out. Makes your body all soft, like the world is giving you a warm bath. So right about then I was happy it was kicking in, because otherwise I might not have answered.
"April," I said. "April Morgan."
Tyson looked at me for a long time. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I got nervous with how long he was looking at me. Reminded me of when my dad read my report card.
Finally, he said, "Hey, Devon. You smoke weed?"
I said, "All the time."
* * *
The truth is, I had never smoked weed. I like to control my high, and who knows what you're gonna get when you buy weed off some skater loser in Fort Washington Park?
But what I said was, "All the time."
That's when he took off his shoe and pulled out a tightly folded plastic baggy that was taped under the flap.
"When are your parents getting home?" he asked.
"Late," I said. "They teach evening classes on Tuesday."
"You wanna toke?"
I didn't.
"Yeah, awesome," I said.
So I went into the kitchen and got a lighter—one of those long ones you use for pilot lights.
When I came back to the pool, Tyson looked up at me. "First, we pray," he said.
I couldn't tell if he was serious, but then he got down on both knees and closed his eyes. There he was, kneeling on the blue slate around our disappearing-edge pool, leaves floating down and the smoke of someone's backyard barbeque wafting around us.
After a few seconds, he opened his left eye and gestured for me to kneel down next to him. I looked around the yard—I mean, who wouldn't?—and knelt. I put my hands together in a double fist, like Tyson.
I closed my eyes and we were silent for at least a minute. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing, and I was happy I'd hit that Vicodin, because I could feel my knees melting into the slate like blue marshmallow.
April Morgan came into my mind and a breeze blew and I smelled the barbeque smoke. You know how sometimes smoke smells like grease and sweet? In that moment, I was sure I loved her.
Then Tyson spoke.
"Dear Heavenly Father, we are so thankful for this opportunity to worship thee. We are thankful for this beautiful home, for the men who built it, and for your glory made manifest in the trees around us and the sky above us. And we pray, oh Heavenly Father, that thy Spirit be with those who are sick or afflicted. Please lead us, guide us, and direct us in the ways of truth and right and give to us the strength to help others along the way, that we may serve all men as we serve you. We ask for these things in the name of Jesus Christ."
He paused. "Amen."
I had never been around a real person praying. I don't know if it was the mellow of the Vicodin, the warmth of the early fall air, or what, but I have to admit that I felt something. I don't know how long I knelt there, but I didn't open my eyes until Tyson put his hands on my shoulders.
"Devon, the prayer is over," he said. "Let's blaze one."
* * *
It wasn't until a couple hours later, as we lay on the pink floaties in the center of the pool, looking up at the darkening sky, that I realized he hadn't mentioned April Morgan in the prayer.
In the movies, pot makes people say stupid shit, which is another reason I never wanted to do it. But that night, I'm telling you, it made us smarter, and somehow deeper, and I forgot pretty quickly that he hadn't mentioned April.
Anyway, we talked for a couple hours and, right before Tyson left, I was trying to explain semiotics to him. We were floating on our backs in the pool, and I was talking fast—heart racing, but not in a dangerous way. "Signs don't just 'convey' meanings. They constitute a medium in which meanings are constructed. Semiotics explains how meaning is not passively absorbed by a static consumer of meaning, but arises only in the active process of interpretation. That is, meaning is not discovered, but created."
Except for the pot, and the Vicodin, my mom would have been proud of me. I mean, I'd read all that stuff before, but I'd never been able to put it all together like that.
But Tyson didn't say anything for a long time. Finally, he paddled his floatie over to me and splashed some water on my feet. "You feel that?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"And you feel the way your brain is tingling, millions of little particles all floating around, dropping like snow, or like the confetti at the end of the Super Bowl?"
"Yeah," I said. "I feel it."
"Everything you just said is bullshit. Ain't no such thing as meaning or not meaning. None of that matters unless you're looking for it. You ever hear of Nisargadatta?"
I hadn't.
"He said something like, 'All your speculations about consciousness, they circulate in the consciousness about which they speculate.'"
I looked up at sky, black now, and watched a faint star appear in the blackness. I watched the sky and felt the floatie move across the little ripples in the pool and, for just a moment, I knew what he meant.
Then I forgot what he meant, forgot even what he'd said, but I didn't feel like talking about semiotics anymore.
* * *
The next day was the first day of school.
After we'd smoked the weed and floated in the pool, Tyson left for his hotel and I told him I'd meet him after school to ride with him to the airport. His agent had set him up a lunch appearance signing autographs for the Harvard comedy club, which was sad, but not as sad as smoking a cigarette covered in ketchup.
I didn't see April Morgan until third period. We're both smart as hell—I think I told you that already—so we're both in AP chemistry.
I was sitting at the long desk when she came in. She wore a white skirt with red flowers on it. I don't know what kind of skirt, but it was all flowy and loose. Not like the tennis skirt. Her red hair was tied in all sorts of loops and braids. Maybe she was in a hippie phase or something, but I didn't care, because she sat next to me and, even though she just stared at the dry erase board, I could feel a tingling between us.
Now, I have to admit, I wasn't thinking about the prayer at all, and I wasn't even thinking about Tyson. But now that I think back on it, the tingling kind of reminded me of what I felt when we prayed.
So, there she was and there I was, and when Mr. Frank came in, he
made us lab partners. A bunch of other stuff happened, but the important thing is that he made us lab partners. Halfway into class we started an experiment, making alum out of aluminum. Basic stuff, right?
A little later, as I dumped the potassium hydroxide onto the aluminum scrap, she looked up at me.
"How's your backhand coming?" she asked.
I put the beaker down. "Good. How's yours?"
"Good," she said.
"Awesome."
She added a few milliliters of distilled water. "You look good," she said. "Did you get a lot of sun over the summer?"
I didn't know what to say. The truth was, I hadn't. I mean, I played tennis once a week, but mostly I sniffed Adderall and rocked out on the G5.
"Yeah," I said. "I've been swimming a lot. Folks have a place on the Vineyard." I still don't know why I said that.
"Cool," she said. "Hey, maybe we could play some day after school? Tennis, I mean."
They say that when you die your life flashes before your eyes, but sometimes a piece of it flashes before your eyes while you're still alive. What happened next seemed like a long time, but it wasn't. I flashed back to my room, trying to pray, looking up praying online, finding Tyson, smoking the weed, and floating in the pool.
In my head, I said, "Thank you, God."
To April, I said, "Cool. Yeah. That'd be awesome."
* * *
Tyson and I took the Silver Line to the airport. I guess I didn't need to see him off, but I wanted to tell him what happened with April.
He was quiet on the train. The truth is, I was quiet, too. You know how sometimes you really want to tell someone something but for some reason you don't? Like it's bubbling up from your toes into your belly and wanting to foam out your mouth, but instead it just sticks at the top of your throat? It was like that.
Finally, when we hit the Silver Line Way stop, the old lady next to us got off and we were alone in our row.
"I got her number," I said. "She wants to play tennis."
He was staring at the ads that lined the top of the subway car. He looked down at me slowly and his eyes were heavy.
Light Remains: Three Stories Page 3
