Downers Grove (2 page)

J
UST
for the record, Dad was as universal as a stop sign. He was a musician-slash-mailman, a government job handed to him on a silver platter after his tour of Vietnam. He was a gambler, a poker player, a man who knew how to win with lousy cards. He always bragged it was a game of skill, not of chance. There were a few dusty trophies over the washer and dryer in the basement, but those went in the first garage sale. He was also big on the boob tube, a man who grabbed the
TV Guide
as first choice out of the Sunday paper. He liked the crime shows, always interrupting the characters' dialogue, predicting the outcome. And he usually fell asleep in that big brown chair. That's how I remember him, slouched into the first deep snores, his belly lifting and deflating with every breath.

Dad disappeared one summer night when the stars were burning too bright. With a suitcase of clean laundry and a wallet
of life savings, he rolled off in a pale blue Pontiac smelling of aftershave and a brand-new haircut. The sad thing was nobody was sad.

I found Mom that night sitting on the screened-in porch listening to the nervous fritter of crickets and june bugs. Her sagging eyes were staring into the darkness, her forefinger rubbing the edge of a jelly glass filled with whiskey. She was still trembling from the fight, the big one, the last one.

“Your father has gone off to find himself.” She turned and looked at me for the longest time. “He wants to make believe he's someone else.”

I stared back at her, wondering what to say. Mom's hair was matted by the constant rubbing of sweaty hands. She looked like she was planted in that chair and was destined for an all-nighter.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

“Maybe it's better for him,” she said, “better for us.”

That's Mom; always looking at the upside. The world could be ending and Mom would be ecstatic about the extra days off work. Dad was probably halfway to St. Louis by then. It sort of reminded me of the time the dog ran away, either he would come back in a few days or we'd never see him again. And a guy like that, who just turns his back on his past, who is willing to give up everything he's ever known, any guilt he might have will fade as fast as the sunrise, any sorrow will be drowned in a row of empty Budweisers.

T
RACY
came over looking exceptionally hot. Her blond hair was severely brushed and a fresh coat of pink lipstick smothered her lips. Wearing a tight lavender sweater over a black Wonderbra, a deep purple miniskirt, hot pink tights, and a candy bead necklace, she looked like a character in a new wave video. The sweater had shrunk in the wash or I suppose that's deliberate because Tracy had her belly button pierced, and now every outfit centers around her latest ornament of rebellion. I'm sorry, but I have to protest any social statement that costs twenty dollars at the mall. She sat down beside me, took a pair of scissors out of my Teletubbies lunch box, and started cutting pictures out of
Seventeen
and
Jane.

“You looked wigged,” she said.

“I met Mom's new flame tonight.”

“The fireman?”

“The astronaut. She's like glue stick on this one. I think it might be serious.”

“My mom always says the new one is serious.”

“Your mom is trying to choose between lobster and salmon, my mom is looking for a sale on tuna fish.”

Tracy dipped into her purse for a cigarette. “Where'd you go on your first date?”

“A church social catered by the Ladies of Tupperware. They served Kool-Aid.”

“Well that's a new one.” She laughed. “What about the old man? Do you like him? Is he cute?” She found the Camel Lights, pulled one out, pushed it between her swollen pink lips. Tracy has the most amazing lips.

“I told you. He looks like an astronaut.”

“Yeah, but what else?”

“He's a sex-crazed fundamentalist.”

“There's no commandment against sex.” Tracy lit her cigarette, blew out the match.

“Yeah, but it's implied, isn't it?”

“Maybe.” Tracy shrugged. “Where's your brother?” She looked around, like it would even matter. The boy is absolutely brain-dead.

“He's in the basement practicing feedback.”

“I don't hear anything.”

“He has his headphones on.”

“Is he still in self-purgatory?” Tracy sucked on her cigarette, blew the smoke toward the window, then leaned closer toward the door, as if to hear him calling for her, which he wasn't, because my brother is lost in a far off galaxy aboard his own
private
Enterprise,
slipping into one black hole after another with absolutely no intention of ever coming back.

It wasn't long ago when David was still struggling through his aftershave years, scraping peach fuzz from his face with an antique razor Mom found at a garage sale. Standing in front of the mirror, he'd always nick the tender skin around his newly formed Adam's apple, then press a tiny square of toilet paper on the wound and wear it around the house like some badge of maturity, proof that puberty had struck, that he was acquiring the power of virility, the strength of masculinity, the ability to elicit desire from the opposite sex. His soft blond locks crept down to his shoulders, and the girls at school started using up precious phone time. And then, after a fierce breakup in the ninth grade with some slim-waisted hair goddess named Alice Garvey, he withdrew into a hurricane of stimulants. First some big dips into marijuana and LSD, and now his new resting place, the warm loving arms of heroin. Cobwebs have grown over dark corners nobody ever dreamed existed. Brown circles have blossomed under his wild blue eyes. He quit shaving, the phone stopped ringing. What started out as a flight from boredom has become medical bliss. He's only a reflection of his former self. Tracy's crush is just one more dent in his armor.

“Do you have any homework?” I asked.

“I have a big report due on youth-culture fiction.”

“How's it going?”

“Slow. I haven't even gone to the library yet. It's gonna take forever, but I have to finish it. My life will be over if I don't graduate.” Tracy bit into one of her nonexistent fingernails. “It's so hard to concentrate, knowing the curse is still hanging over us. When do you think it's gonna happen?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Everyone at school is totally freaked about the senior curse. For the past eight years, a member of the senior class has died before graduation, which is now only two weeks away. Nobody has died yet, but I can think of a few candidates. Last year, on prom night, a member of the soccer team was driving barefoot after a kegger and his car kissed the guardrail and did a couple 360s over the embankment. The year before, a girl drowned in the quarries. There was a suicide once, back when I was in junior high, but the rest have been car accidents as far as I can remember. We've been drilled to death about drinking and driving by the school counselors. Last week the state police brought in the crash simulator so we could have a real taste of blood and guts, but when they showed the movie and the car exploded into a ball of flames all the kids in the auditorium cheered. They show the same film year after year. What do they expect?

At last year's sobfest the class president read a poem that went something like “don't try to understand everything because some things don't make sense.” I can't tell you how many times someone used that as an answer in one of my classes this year. It should be our yearbook motto. My classmates are starting to place bets on all the losers, but deep inside they're getting sorta paranoid as well.

“I just hope they don't cancel graduation,” Tracy said. “I'd feel so empty being thrown into society without a ceremony.”

Tracy and I were making collages for our fanzine
As My Stomach Turns,
an after-school project that has ballooned into a major time consumer. We started it when the school paper didn't report the shooting in the parking lot: Some sophomore math whiz went postal and blew away a few hall monitors and
a gym coach before ramming the gun into his own mouth and making spaghetti of what was left of his mind. He was part of a crowd that sprinkled angel dust on their Wheaties, the spiritual leader of some thick-headed glue-sniffing satanists who liked to mutilate small animals after school. Tracy recorded some interviews on her Walkman and transcribed them word for word, then pasted them into columns and illustrated it with snapshots she took with a disposable camera. (I liked the one of me standing in front of the gunman's locker.) We made a bunch of copies at her mom's office.

Our little rag has a total circulation of about fifty copies, but that's only because we're more interested in designing the next issue then distributing the old one. Xeroxing is a drag. Our current issue is centered around astrological predictions about the curse, which we obtained from a psychic in California by dialing a 900 number, and our only letter (from a guy!), which asked, “What should I do if I get a boner in the shower after gym class?”

Tracy and I combed the yearbook twice trying to figure out who might be gay. We tried to match the handwriting to signatures from last year and the year before that. Nobody has ever come out of the closet at our high school, because they know they would die. Which means our next issue will be highly controversial. Tracy says we might get suspended and then we could protest and become international media darlings for taking a stand against the evil marauders that run our school system, but my fear is that a few morons will use the issue as an excuse for a witch-hunt and there might be some misguided bloodshed over rumors and innuendo. Either way the sensational aspect of our coverage will ensure another sellout, and
we'll be stealing as many free copies from Kinko's as possible in a matter of days.

One night I was baby-sitting at the neighbor's house and they have a computer, so
As My Stomach Turns
went global over the Internet. We posted X-rated letters to rock stars. Tracy lied and said she was a sixteen-year-old model itching to lose her virginity. One guy wrote back and asked her to describe the girls' locker room at school. Which of course she did—in livid detail, going off on this huge lie about having her underwear stolen and spending the entire day without panties. Tracy's posting got about a zillion responses from perverts all across the universe. At first she was real proud of her sexual conquest, but later she started getting paranoid and told me some creep followed her through the lingerie department at Wal-Mart.

I've known Tracy since forever. When we first met on the grade-school playground she shined like a quarter you find under a couch cushion. She bleached and ironed my hair, got me started as a vegan, and sorta introduced me to sex. Tracy was the beacon that helped advertise my desire. She has an amazing ability to get attention, but she's more talk than action. Tracy is a chronic serial crusher and gets the itch to ditch a guy as soon as she snags him, but if she feels even the slightest tremor of lust she's on the phone burning a hole in my eardrum. Talking is her Valium.

“Did you hear that?” Tracy asked.

“Hear what?”

Tracy tilted her ear downward, as if she were trying to tune in some fading frequency leaking from the basement. “Nothing, I guess.” She went back to work with the scissors.

Tracy's had a major crush on my brother since the day her eyes landed in his airport, and his constant indifference is the equivalent of throwing petroleum on a brush fire. Her devotion has synthesized into a cultish groupie eulogy. She arrives on our doorstep with the regularity of a commuter train, acting like some lost princess looking for her misplaced shoe. David somehow fits into her tidy mold of an alternative grungelord. Mr. Depression, however, is not into girls right now. He'd rather stay in the basement like some musty old troll and snort heroin with his stupid friends. The four of them sit around a card table every weekend playing gin rummy, blasting their records so loud the neighbor told the cops it was drowning out his lawn mower.

The deck of playing cards is as dirty and frayed as everything else in the basement. One day, the jack of spades tore in half, and so my brother taped it back together, then tore up all the other jacks and taped them up too. So now everybody knows you have a jack, but not which suit. It's the stupid kind of logic he and his friends have for everything. My brother's been keeping score since they were fourteen, and at a penny a point he thinks he might be able to retire at thirty-four. And sometimes I wonder if it's not true: not the retirement, but the fact that they'll still be down there fifteen years from now.

“Is your brother gonna start a new band?” Tracy asked.

“He says he doesn't want to go commercial.”

“Starting a band would be a sellout?”

“According to him, the only way to be alternative is to not participate.”

Tracy leaned her head back toward the door in that solemn gushing hush, so respectful, so willing, way of hers.

My brother's old band, GLOOM, broke up after the lead singer hung himself. Joey's suicide note declared his weakness his greatest strength, and his death his greatest artistic achievement. The guy had dirty ears, that's all I remember about him. Tracy never got over it and still whispers whenever she talks about him.

“So what's going on with you and the mechanic?” Tracy asked. “Have you taken the car in for a tune-up yet?” She worked the scissors around a dELiA*s supermodel, anxious for some lurid details, which I usually made up for her carnivorous needs.

“I did a drive-by in Mom's car.”

“And?”

“He had his shirtsleeves rolled up.”

“That's it?”

“What did you expect?”

“Well at least you could've stopped for gas.”

“I can't get gas every day!”

“Why not? It's a free country.”