It’s hot and humid up here, no ventilation, and I gasp for air—one whole side of the apartment covered in windows without shades. I no longer hear that crunching of plastic under my feet and instead it is soft—wall-to-wall green carpet. The room comes into focus now, the little white circles leaving my vision, and I see the whole fake setup—the fake, hollow, plastic couch across from the fake, hollow, plastic entertainment unit with fake flat-screen TV. The plants are fake and the tables and dining room table and chairs are fake. I knock them with my fist and they echo inside. Hollow. The kitchen is real and the kitchen island and chopping block on the counter are real and the big bowl next to the sink is real, but the fruit in the bowl is fake. Mom leads me back through a small hallway past a bathroom with real toothbrushes in a real toothbrush stand, to the bedroom, which is just more of the same fake, hollow, plastic shit—queen size bed, dresser, lamps with fake light (I’m not even kidding—fake, yellow light!) and a fake TV. I look to Fell’s Point and see dark clouds forming and raindrops tapping against the windows. Everything still looks like plastic and smells like dust. “All of this looks almost real,” I say.
“It’s supposed to give prospective buyers a vision of their own stuff in the space.”
“This place is yours?”
“That’s what they said.”
“They?”
“The investors.” She walks to the window, her hands on her hips, then adjusts fake flowers in a real vase. “I’m your mother. You are supposed to root for your mother. Not treat her like a spy who’s committed treason.”
I don’t know why I am drilling her on all of this, really. I could give a fuck at the end of the day. Fuck this place. Fuck her. Fuck Zeke. Fuck Dad. Fuck it all. But she speaks with such fucking hope.
“This is what I’m telling you,” she says, her arms out to the room. “This is what I’m working on.” She slaps the wall—it is real, no echo. “This is the best I have right now and I want you to be a part of it, Jeremy. I want you here with me.”
Mom digs through her purse again, finds it, opens it, pops it into her mouth—a movement that should have been invisible but wasn’t. Not even a little bit. Tiny blue pills turn to dust between her teeth. And she doesn’t even say the Lord’s Prayer. This is something new—a change.
34
Jimmy’s—a Fell’s Point diner best known for their Breakfast Bowl: grits, scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and cheddar cheese heaped together and soaked in hot sauce—is predictably slammed. The small dining area is packed with every type of person imaginable. No one is too good for Jimmy’s. Construction workers. Businessmen. Businesswomen. Teenagers like me in groups. Old folks with walkers. Homeless folks, nickel-and-diming. Everyone’s drinking coffee and shoveling food into their mouths. The waitresses scream orders to the line cooks who crash into one another at the grill, serving plates and slapping them on the servers’ station to be delivered to tables.
The table is covered with a red and white-checkered plastic tablecloth, sticky from maple syrup or spilled apple juice. Our waitress is older than I had expected any waitress to ever be. Her silvery-blue hair doesn’t move when she walks. She limps a cup of coffee over and sets it down in front of Mom and lowers a tall glass of chocolate milk in front of me and asks if we are ready to order. Her voice is a super-shaky old lady voice, cracking so much that I think for second she might actually die on us right here. Mom says that we’re waiting for her other son, before we order. The granny waitress smiles and her whole face lights up in a beautiful glow as she walks over to the counter nearby and sits on a stool, breathing heavy, rubbing her knees.
“I want you to spend the night at my apartment tonight.” Mom puts up her hands, stopping me from responding. “Don’t say anything now. Think about it. I can call your Dad and arrange everything.
We can watch movies and eat pizza and stay up late and make ice cream sundaes like we used to do when you were little.”
“What about Zeke?” I ask.
“What about Zeke?” Her hand reaches across the table and grabs mine and I let her. She looks to the front door. “I wonder when Jackson will get here. He’s usually early.”
“Why did you leave?” I ask.
“It’s complicated,” she says. “Hard to explain.”
“Well, which one is it?” I ask. “Is it complicated? Or is it hard to explain?” I ask.
“Both,” Mom says, checking her watch, then the door. “Neither. I don’t know.” Mom roots through her purse, pulling out the damn phone, buzzing again. She flips it open, speaks softly. She stands and kisses my cheek without a sound and vanishes.
“You ready to order, hon?” our old lady waitress asks, sitting on a nearby stool. Her face hangs heavy, wrinkles from ear to ear. Brown spots splotch across her arms and neck. Her nametag reads Rhonda.
“Not yet. I think we’re still waiting for my brother. He’s always late.”
“My daughter was like that. Not a punctual bone in her body.”
“You have a daughter?”
“Had.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Are you psychic?” she asks.
“No.”
“Then how would you know, hon?”
“What was her name?”
“Becca. Really it was Rebecca. My husband, Kirby, and I called her Becca, God rest his soul. She was more of a Becca than a Rebecca anyway.”
Not only did I bring up one painful loss for her, but I also brought up her dead fucking husband. I am a lump of cold crap. I take a sip of my milk and set the cold glass down next to Mom’s purse. I pull out a wallet, red pen, travel pack of tissues, Revlon lipstick, over-sized Ray Ban sunglasses, and a checkbook. I pull out three prescription bottles. Each has a different name. None of them Corrine Barker.
Thirty milligram bottles of MS Contin. Morphine pills. Baby blues. Prescribed to other women or fake women, ultimately women that are not her—Jane Barker, Joanne Barker, Jill Barker. I line the bottles up like soldiers and sit back in my chair, facing them.
I close my eyes again and make a wish—that God would come down from Heaven and, in a moment of divine intervention, take my sight. Pluck out my eyes like apples from a tree. I want to say a prayer, some kind of new prayer, some kind of random hodgepodge of words that could pass as religious. With all the faith a non-Catholic, Catholic school kid can muster, I open my eyes and see her sitting there in front of me, my glass of chocolate milk and three prescription pill bottles between us.
She closes her eyes. Then, she verbalizes her prayer. “Jesus Christ,” she says.
35
Mom drops me off at school, leaving me enough time to get to my locker, open it without incident from my back-up secret combination still in my shoe, then to first period with Mr. Rembrandt. Jackson didn’t show for breakfast, of course, but we waited for him anyway, Mom making excuses for him the whole ride to school. I enter the class early today and on my own will, no need for Brother Lee to escort me again. Although, as soon as I sit down I am reminded of the DVD in Dad’s closet and that this motherfucker gave it to him.
The last to arrive, Mr. Rembrandt walks in and says, “Welcome, watch, and listen.” He writes POV on the board and claps chalk dust from his hands. “Point of View, gentlemen,” he says. “The point from which to best tell your story.” He combs wispy, brown hair over his bald spot and readjusts blue-rimmed glasses high up on the bridge of his nose, which make him look like he reads three newspapers a day. “It tells us what we see, but also—and equally as important—what we don’t see.” He wears a polka dot tie in a Windsor.
Mr. Rembrandt—Mr. 8-Fingers. Seriously. I’ve heard kids call him Four-Fingered Faggot. Let’s examine some sick-shit theories:
1. The most popular and leading theory is that his mutant hands are the product of defensive wounds from a knife fight, the emergency room unable to reattach the pinkies to the heart of each hand.
2. Another speculation is that he was born with webbed hands. The sto
ry continues that a plastic surgeon was brought in to cut away the webs and, in order to save both hands, was forced to cut away the pinkies.
3. A more interesting and recent development is a gay rumor that, in order to hide the fact that he is a homosexual, he cut them off himself to keep them from lifting up into the air whenever he sips from a cup.
“We’ve all read Act One of Hamlet. Question—is Hamlet crazy? Is there a mental disorder in place? Is he mad or simply depressed and heartbroken? Is he really seeing the ghost of his dead father? What is your point of view?” He stalks the classroom, walking between rows, his mutilated hands behind his back. He points to the greasy-haired Dirtbag Boy in the back row.
“I think he’s a whole bag full of crazy from the start. He says: ’O, that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!’ He wants his flesh to melt and thaw? Self-slaughter? He’s twisted. He’s a nutbag.”
Super Shy Kid raises his hand and Mr. Rembrandt calls on him.
“It’s a fine line though. His dead father’s ghost has just told him to enact revenge on his behalf. If we are talking about POV and Shakespeare is showing us this crazy scene, but also showing us sane scenes without Hamlet, then the ghost could very well be fact, just as the Hamlet-less scenes are fact. We either believe it all as real or all as fake. It’s a point of view.”
“What about this ghost of the father?” Mr. Rembrandt says. “Why is this important?”
A kid that is either baked out of his mind or extremely sleepy speaks. “Hammy’s got Daddy issues.”
“Explain,” Mr. Rembrandt says, adjusting his glasses, moving them farther up his nose. Then tightens up the knot of the fattest Windsor I have ever seen.
“His dad is dead. You have to let that shit—I mean stuff—go. But Hammy doesn’t. He not only sees his father’s ghost, but the ghost tells him to kill his uncle. It’s obvious to me that Hammy’s projecting. He wants his dad back, but can’t have his dad back, so goes all Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Someone behind me asks, “What do you think, Mr. Rembrandt?”
“What I think is not important. It’s important what you think. So in an effort to explore that a bit more and get a good grasp on POV, we’re going to do an interactive exercise,” he says. “We’re going to use questions to help us tell a story from a unique point of view.”
He calls out names in pairs.
Mykel’s in the class, and he’s who I’m partnered with. Mykel smiles at me and says, “Yo, Little Man.”
Mr. Rembrandt continues. “One of you is the subject and one of you is the biographer. Ask as many questions as you need to write your portrait. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
“Do you care what you are?” Mykel asks.
“How about I ask the questions?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “I like being the subject.” Mykel wears tan corduroys, a pink shirt, and green and white striped tie in a Limp Dick. No plaid. I want to write these details down. I had completely forgotten about his odd name.
“My first question,” I say, “is about photography. You take the bus home from school. Stand out by the street. Wear those oversized headphones clamped around your head like a vice. That big camera.” I mimic the way he holds that enormous camera with an extra long lens in his hand that looks like a boner. “You take pictures at the bus stop of parked cars and old ladies holding brown paper bags full of groceries and shit.”
“I didn’t hear a question,” he says. He turns a big, gold stud in his ear and leans farther back in his chair.
“Find your unique point of view?” Mr. Rembrandt says, rubbing his nubby hands together. I never noticed it before, but his hands look like guns, two fleshy firearms, his nubs like triggers. BLAM. BLAM.
“How long have you been into photography?” I ask.
“Chopography,” he says, handing me a postcard that reads Chopography Exhibit by Mykel, advertising his art show at the Daily Grind downtown in Fell’s Point. It’s similar to the flyers we handed out the other day, but this is smaller and has a word I’ve never seen before. “chopography,” I say.
“I take pictures of shit, then chop them up and piece them back together. Chopography.”
“I know this place,” I say. “It’s near my brother’s apartment.”
“You should come.”
“What is it that you do exactly?”
Mykel makes scissors with his fingers and clips them along a line in front of his face.
“How do you chop pictures up?”
“Do I hear hard-hitting questions?” Mr. Rembrandt asks, walking behind us, clapping his hands. Nasty nubs. I look at his freak hands and want to ask him a hard-hitting question.
“We’re good,” Mykel says. He hands Mr. Rembrandt a postcard.
“This is great, Mykel,” he says, waving the postcard like a fan.
“You should come,” Mykel says. “Might see something you like.”
“I just might.”
Mr. Rembrandt moves on to a pair of guys picking out rims in a car mag.
“What do you get out of chopping people up in pictures?” I ask Mykel.
“Satisfaction,” Mykel says. He sits up in his chair, rubbing at a dark stain in the wood of his desk. “Satisfaction in the act. I feel good when I do it.”
“Why do you do it?” I ask.
“Why do dogs bark?”
“But you chop up pictures and reassemble them like Frankenstein’s monster,” I say. “Why?”
Mr. Rembrandt announces that we will be presenting our partners at the front of the classroom. He asks who wants to go first. He asks who has the stones to be the first to face the firing squad. He says, “Volunteers. Volunteers. Volunteers.”
Mykel’s hand goes up and volunteers on my behalf. Mr. Rembrandt gets giddy with excitement, clapping his hands, calling us up; waving us on with his freak hands. As we approach the front of the room, I ask Mykel again why he chops up photographs. I ask him what he gets out of it.
“Honestly,” he says, blowing hot air into closed fists, “so I don’t do it for real.”
Immediately, I think of tongue extractions.
36
The cafe is curiously quiet—tables crowded with bodies, sport coats hung from the backs of chairs, book bags held between feet, hands delivering fistfuls of food to anxious mouths. It doesn’t take a seasoned anthropologist to be able to analyze the dynamics of the high school watering hole. Like any animal in the wild, the Byron Hall boy stays to his own kind, careful not to stray too far away from the pack.
Stoner table by the lunch line for obvious reasons—shaggy hair, baggy clothes, smoke heaps of weed behind the lecture hall building. Barely a Limp Dick all around.
Band table next table over—awkward kids in thick-rimmed glasses, hair gelled in strict parts, acne attacked and boil-ridden foreheads. A Half-Windsor and Limp Dick split.
Miscellaneous jock tables all over the place—plaid jackets, plaid shirts, plaid ties, plaid pants. Chatter about getting laid and wasted on cheap beer and expensive vodka. Windsor knots.
Sorry, sad-sack loser table near the fire exit—normal kids who don’t play instruments, or participate in sports, or excel in skateboarding, or smoke weed, or drink anything but energy drinks. Clip-on ties and Limp Dicks.
Computer geek table in Fuck Central near the vending machines—super smart kids that carry calculators the way most people carry car keys. Limp Dick, absolutely.
Drama club table—the loudest kids in the school with coiffed hair and a fine knowledge of the latest dance music. Expertly knotted Half-Windsor’s.
Debate table—future lawyers and bankers of the world. Windsors tied with precision.
Blue Jay Weekly table—the newspaper kids in crisp, white shirts, perpetually ink-blackened fingers. Windsor knots loose around necks.
Artist table—bright colored shirts that don’t match their bright colored pants. Big,
fat ties in Limp Dick knots.
Jeremy Barker table—nonexistent. I walk with my head down past the soccer jock table, where Cam Dillard and the plaid monkeyfuck bastards sit flicking each other in the ear. I want to punch the douchebag and his gang of retard robot monkeys. At a table in the middle of the room I see Mykel and an open spot across from him.
“Anyone sitting here?” I ask him, pulling the chair back. I drop my brown bag lunch on the table. “You hear we got Mr. Vo today in Christian Awareness? Brother Larry’s out.”
“Nice,” Mykel says. “Mr. Vo’s cool as shit.”
“Who are you?” a kid says. “And what the fuck are you eating?”
“Jeremy,” I say. I open the tinfoil from my pepperoni sandwich and take a huge bite.
“You’re white,” he says.
“I’m friends with Mykel,” I say and feel completely weird about him saying that I am white. Because he’s black and if I had said what he said to me, but said “you’re black” instead of “you’re white,” what would have happened?
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
“Jimmy Two,” he says.
“Jimmy what?” I ask, leaning closer to him.
“His name is James James,” Mykel says. “We call him Jimmy Two.”
“The fuck kind of sandwich is that?” Jimmy Two asks. He puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me away from him.
“Large-cut pepperoni sandwich on whole wheat with mayo and lettuce.” The tinfoil of my sandwich is open on the table like a body during surgery. It’s smells spicy and sweet.
“Smells like shit,” Jimmy Two says. “Don’t bring that shit to our table. Goddamn guinea food at the BAC table, boy.”
I wonder for a moment what the fuck BAC means and when I look at the faces of the guys sitting around me I get it. Fuck. Double fistfuck.
The Black Awareness table—every black kid in school belongs to this club. And no one sits at their table unless they are, well, black. Well-dressed. Gold chains with crosses looped around necks. Chunky watches, loose on their wrists. Trimmed facial hair cut close to the skin, well-manicured like a lawn. Ties tied in different knots, tied with the utmost care and attention. Casanovas. The rowdiest table in the cafe. The center of the room. The table nobody fucks with. The BAC—the Black Awareness Club.
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