Random

by Lesley Choyce

  So have you had enough of me already? Odd but interesting? Or just demented? Most everyone has written me off in one way or another. All except for my current parents. And Gloria. And, of course, Dean.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I guess I should tell you about my current parents. My father’s name is Willard but he is known as Will. Mom is Beth. Will and Beth MacDonald. They were incredibly brave in adopting me. Can you imagine? We have this twelve-year-old kid who is probably scarred for life and if he turns out the slightest bit normal, we will all be shocked. I think the social worker said something like that.

  “We want the kid,” my father would have said. “We want to help.”

  “We can handle this,” my mom would have added. “We can make this work.” Or so I envision the conversation.

  I’m sure my many months of silence freaked them out, but I’m also certain my dad put a good spin on it. “He never complains,” my dad would have told his colleagues. “And he has good eating habits.”

  The eating habit part would have been important to Will. After all, he owns a health food store. He’s big on vegetables and positively anything organic. And I was willing to eat whatever he set in front of me. Kale, for example. My dad was thrilled that I would eat kale. And if I ever seemed unhappy or unhealthy, he would say something like, “I don’t think Joseph is getting enough selenium.” Or he’d try to feed me wild salmon from Alaska. “Omega-3 always does the trick.” I never complained about the fish, either.

  Maybe that’s why I never get sick. My selenium levels are way up there. The kale wards off diphtheria and cholera and those diseases spread by chickens from China. And the salmon helps, too. “A good diet can allow you to live to be a hundred. Easily,” Dad would say.

  I’m not sure I want to live to be a hundred, though. A hundred is eighty-four years away. I’m more of a one-day-at-a time kind of person. There are so many pluses and minuses in life, if you know what I mean. Sometimes there seem to be more minuses and, on those days, despite my good diet and great health, I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I’m sure you know what that feels like.

  So my dad hopes that one day I’ll take over the health food store. It’s called Nature’s Bounty. I can’t envision myself running Nature’s Bounty. I work there part-time, though, and it’s kind of weird. Women ask me which of the vitamins will help them lose weight. I don’t know if vitamins help you lose weight but I pick up a plastic container of expensive vitamins with a picture of a thin woman on it. “Take one a day,” I say. “Drink a lot of water and eat fresh vegetables. Kale is good for losing weight. It has a lot of selenium in it and it’s excellent roughage.” My dad talks a lot about roughage so I’m sort of borrowing from him.

  Men come into the store sometimes and wander around looking for something. They look nervous and uncomfortable. At first I thought they were trying to steal something but I soon began to understand what they were looking for. “I’m looking for something to restore ... my vitality,” they might say and I’d give the same routine about vitamins, kale, water, and maybe show them some Omega-3 and a men’s vitamin with a healthy-looking older dude on it.

  “Well,” one of them might say, “not just my vitality but my youth.”

  “Hmm.”

  “My libido.”

  “Duh?”

  Then the whisper. “I’m talking about sex.”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t know about all the stuff in the store. I didn’t know there were health store pills for sex. All I’d ever heard about was Viagra and we didn’t sell that.

  “Have you tried ginseng?” I asked.

  “No. Is it good?”

  “Good. Are you kidding? It’s great.” I made it sound like I was taking ginseng and getting laid all the time.

  “I’ll take some.”

  I asked my dad later about this and he told me there were supplements in the store that I could steer customers to next time. “Ginseng might help,” he said. “At least it can’t hurt. But next time you can steer them toward the horny goat weed.”

  I laughed. “No way!”

  “Way,” he said. “That’s what it’s called. They say it really works—on goats, at least.” He smiled.

  So the next time I saw a male customer lurking around, I steered him straight down the aisle to the horny goat weed. I even steered some of the men looking to lose weight to the horny goat weed. “Nothing helps you to lose weight better,” I’d say to them, “than a lot of sex.”

  Not that I know that much about sex. I’m more or less on the sidelines in that department. Sex is for people like Oliver and Rachelle. I’ve tried talking about sex with Gloria, the oh-so serious one, but she is, alas, so serious. And I’m kind of shy in that department. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I took some horny goat weed. But I’m too scared to try. I’ve read in a magazine about the possible side effects of Viagra, for example. Some men end up in the hospital. They get up but they can’t get back down. And that would be kind of embarrassing, if you get my drift.

  But enough about sex.

  My mother is an investment counselor with the bank. She thinks selenium is something you should invest in, I think. And platinum. And gold. She’s not that thrilled with silver right now. “Silver is in a slump,” I heard her say to one of her clients on the phone. “But molybdenum is hot.” Molybdenum is a metal used in a lot of high-tech stuff, in case you haven’t heard. It could be what they call “the next big thing.” But Beth, like my dad, is also environmentally conscious, so she only recommends investing in companies that are environmentally friendly. Since many mining companies are notorious for raping and pillaging the earth, I would think this is a damn hard thing to do.

  She sometimes uses investment terminology when referring to our family but, don’t get me wrong, she’s a great mother. “We took a bit of a gamble on you,” she once said about me. “We knew there would be some short-term volatility but the long term looked good. I think we made a wise move.”

  They couldn’t have children of their own. Some problem with my mother’s eggs. There was no health store cure for it and they’d tried fertility clinics. They were thinking about adopting a girl from China when I came along.

  I’ve always felt a little guilty about that. There is some orphan girl in China who did not get adopted because of me. If I had been in the car with my bio-parents, this small bit of history would have turned out much differently.

  My mother took off from work for three months when I was adopted. So did my dad. Will and Beth were worried and tried everything to make me feel at home. It took a while but I got on with my life. I try not to revisit those deep, dark places where I could go if I let myself. Somewhere down the line, I may explore the past to learn more about my bio-parents, Henry and Seal, but not yet. It may turn ugly for me and I don’t want ugly in my life right now. And it could be that I may never go there to explore the pain of losing my parents. I don’t know what the future will bring. And I don’t want to know.

  None of us knows about the future. I can live with that. I’m not one of those kids with hopes and aspirations. I don’t want to be famous or rich. I don’t want to invent things or do good deeds. I’d like to have sex with a girl before I leave high school, but I don’t have much of a plan in that regard. I just don’t want to be like one of those men lurking around the health food store, waiting to discover horny goat weed in order to have a sex life.

  Now I know I should be calling it “making love” and not just “having sex.” I haven’t sorted out the love / sex thing yet.

  Some things take time.

  The purpose of the digital diary, as I understand it, is to understand who I am. That is, who I am now; who I am now is quite different from who I was five years ago. Who I am today is not even the same as who I was yesterday. Everything keeps changing. The world is in “flux.” The world, as I see it, is fluxed.

  And it is in need of a good revolution. A turning. A change. A big transformation that no one
sees coming. There is a theory called the “foco theory.” (You may soon discover that I am a big fan of theories and ideas and unusual terms. Both of my bio-parents liked to use the word theory, beginning sentences like this: “In theory, that would be the right thing to do, but in reality ...” Even when I was young, one or the other was referring to some theory they had read about. Once they were both gone, I found myself looking up all kinds of theories to try to help explain what the hell was going on in the world. There was never any philosophical or scientific theory that made perfect sense, but each new theory I glommed onto added something to my understanding—or lack thereof—of the forces at work around me.) But I digress.

  According to foco theory, a small group of very animated people can make society change in a radical way. You do not have to wait for conditions to create a demand for change. This small but hardy group of excitable humans can inspire and ignite an uprising, and change will occur.

  They say this is what happened in Cuba. Che Guevara (1928–1967) and his followers did just that. Foco revolution. The Americans did not like this little bit of history. World in flux. I don’t know what happened to Che Guevara but I think he died. And Cuba changed. But Cuba did not change the world.

  Of course, you might also have to take into account the so-called “least effort principle,” put forward by an American shrink with the very cool name of G.K. Zipf. He came to the conclusion that animals, and probably all organisms when confronted with several choices, tend to pick the one that requires the least effort. He studied rats to come up with this rather obvious theory. So, if your teacher says you have the option of doing your homework or not doing your homework, and either way you get an A, which would you choose? The one that requires the least effort, of course.

  Revolutions, as Che Guevara and others discovered, take a lot of effort. So you have to work damn hard, I’d say, to get people worked up enough to join your revolution. I myself have not selected what kind of revolution I’d put forward. Not yet, anyway. But I am thinking about it. The only problem is that I have very few social skills and even fewer friends. Gloria would, of course, help me with my revolution if it were a good cause. But I don’t think I am that type. I think my first revolution would just be designed to remove Monday from the days of the week. Mondays bite.

  My parents worry that I might not be able to find my way in the world. They recognize my confusion. My lack of focus. My non-linear way of living my life. I do not select my clothes in the morning, for example. My clothes select me. I close my eyes and reach into my closet and whichever shirt wants to be worn, it directs my hand to it. Same for pants. I call it automatic dressing. Some of the combinations are odd but I never second-guess my clothing. Even socks. If two socks don’t match, I wear them anyway. This used to produce results quite amusing to my classmates, but now my mom sneaks into my room and pairs my socks, like a medieval matchmaker.

  At school, I make a point of saying hello to random people at random times. I sometimes ignore kids I actually know and instead say, “Hey, how’s it going?” to guys and girls I have never spoken to before. The results are interesting. One older guy from twelfth grade called me a “homo.” In his mind, an unknown male student saying hello indicates homosexuality. Seems perfectly logical to me.

  A science teacher, Ms. Mallory, seemed impressed by my random hello. When she saw me again, she said hello to me and asked me my name. Joseph, I told her. Joseph Campbell. “The Joseph Campbell?” she said. I didn’t know what she meant by that but I said, “Yes, the Joseph Campbell,” and decided to take her biology class the next year because she showed an interest in me and because she had nice legs. Am I a total perv because I like science teachers with great legs?

  I gave Oliver my random hello once. He and I are not exactly breathing any of the same oxygen or even abiding on nearby planets. He just snarled. I forgot about snarling. It was pretty fascinating. He snarled just like Mr. Langford’s Rottweiler down the street. What should a person who is tossing around a thousand theories in his head make of that?

  And the girls who get the random hi—the “howzitgoing-today?”— mostly don’t seem to mind. I look them in the eye for effect and they smile. Some flutter their eyelashes, which I find way cool. Some say, “Oh, hi,” in a polite, shy fashion. They don’t actually stop and have a conversation with me or anything. Only one girl got mad. Rachelle’s friend, Destiny. Her response was, “What drugs are you on?”

  So, as you can see, this all goes into my digital diary. I am doing this for my parents because they took a big chance adopting me. But my DD is not—I repeat, not—for my parents to listen to. It is for you, some random you, whoever you are, who I may or may not know. My perfect audience of one. Or none, as the case may be.

  But, like I said, my parents asked me to do this because they thought it would be good for me. So I am doing it. I owe them big time. As you can imagine, they want me to be happy. They want me to be normal. I’m happy sometimes but that, too, seems to happen at random times.

  I even have golden moments. I didn’t know what those golden moments were until I was reading a rather randomly picked book from the library about eastern religions. I discovered the word that Japanese Zen Buddhists have for those splashes of euphoria. The word is satori. And here’s the kicker. For me, they seem to happen for no apparent reason whatsoever. Surprise, surprise.

  I’ll be sitting through history class on a day dull as dirty dishwater and suddenly I’ll feel cheerful. I’ll feel okay. I’ll feel happy to be alive. And I don’t know why. Or I’ll be walking down Gordon Street with a tune in my head, something by the False Prophets, when it kicks in. Once it even happened when I was thinking about my childhood. I had this perfect memory of being maybe five years old, sitting on the grass, playing with some round stones I was collecting. My bio-parents were there, kind of out of focus in the bright sun, but there nonetheless. And it was all so real. And then it was gone. And I cried.

  The hard part of any satori is coming back down. I didn’t tell my current parents about the memory because, when I do stuff like that, my mom cries and then my dad cries. My dad never cries first. Usually it’s mom and then dad. First her and then him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My parents don’t worry as much about me as they did when I was younger. I don’t know what they thought I would do. But they worried a lot, for sure. Beth gave me books to read that had hopeful messages. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Cream of Mushroom Soup for the Angst-Ridden Adolescent, Broth for the Brainless, and other ones. Maximize your Happiness, I think, was the name of one. A couple of financial titles like Think and Grow Rich or Mind over Money. My mom isn’t all that greedy but she has a thing about money. She likes the way it moves. It makes sense to her and she is a sober and steady investment counselor.

  My mom helps people who save money and invest it wisely. She even invested $5,000 in a trust fund for me when I was adopted and it is now worth $25,000.

  “How come it’s worth so much?” I asked one morning at breakfast.

  “Because we did nothing,” she answered, and then promptly rushed off to work—presumably to counsel other young parents about making money by doing nothing. “That’s the trick,” I could hear her say. “The trick is doing nothing.”

  I told her, “Mom, you should write a book called The Art of Doing Nothing or The Science of Doing Nothing Well.” I understand this could have a double meaning, though. After she had breezed out of the kitchen and off to her enclave of negative optimal capitalism (I just made that up) my dad, peering up at me through his Harry-Potter-round wire-rimmed glasses, tried to explain to me what she does at work.

  “Your mom is like a gardener,” he explained. “It’s like she plants the seeds and then lets the rain and sunshine do all the work. But you need good seeds, good soil, lots of sun, and patience.” So the seeds were the money, the soil was the economy, the sun was, I guess, good economic growth, and patience was, well, patience. I needed to translate for myse
lf since my dad was mostly an organic farmer at heart even though he didn’t have an organic farm. “She got excited about platinum a long time ago,” he added. “And zinc. I never knew someone could get so excited about zinc. But she always bought and just held on.” He grasped some imaginary thing in front of him so that he was holding out two fists. But it wasn’t nasty fists. It was just grasping imaginary bars of platinum and zinc.

  “Don’t you sell zinc in the health food store?”

  “Yes. It wards off colds and other diseases.”

  “Is it as good as selenium?”

  “Both are good for you in the proper doses. Too much of either and you could be in trouble, though.”

  “Too much of anything and you could be in trouble,” I added, trying to keep up my end of the conversation.

  I must have looked sad, though, because next my dad raised his glasses up onto his forehead and asked, “Is everything okay at school?”

  “School is school,” I answered. I could have added, “Life is life,” or “It is what it is,” or any number of inane things I was prone to saying.

  “I hear you,” he said. “I know what you’re saying,” intoned as if he was one of my friends—of which there were very few. Well, two, really.

  My father sat there looking at me until he realized I felt uncomfortable, so he went back to dipping into a bowl of muesli and organic Balkan yogurt. He had told me once that yogurt, Balkan yogurt with real live bacterial culture, was what allowed some people in the Balkans to remain healthy and strong well into old age.

  I dipped into my own bowl of muesli. Thirty-five percent nuts and fruits, it said on the box—“just like school,” I once said to my dad when I was helping to restock the shelves of the store and I was trying to be funny—which was not all that often. I wondered again what it would be like to live to a hundred. Living till that old was not high on my list of wishes. Living to sixteen seemed rough enough. Not that I wanted to off myself. Nothing like that. It just seemed that living to be a hundred could become a bit of a chore. What would you do with all those hours and days and years?