Fat kid rules the world (6 page)

On the other hand, this is Curt. I may not know a lot about Curt, but so far he seems to have an unlimited capacity for denial.

Big breath in.

Curt, we need to talk
…. I rehearse the speech in my head.
I was just playing along, I can’t really play the drums, I get hives when people stare at me
…. I open my mouth but Curt interrupts. He’s digging through a box of CDs, oblivious to my angst.

“What groups do you like, T?”

I silently curse at the use of the nickname.
Damn him
. The question seems totally unprompted, as if he’s just thinking out loud, wondering what I like. No harm in that, right?

I pause. “Well … I …” Now I’m flustered.

Curt looks up. “Don’t you know what you like?” His face is contorted with disbelief and he looks like a ferret again. “You said you liked Smack Metal Puppets, right?”

I blush furiously. I do, but there’s something embarrassing about admitting it. Fat kids ought to be into groups that are kind of funny, right? Weezer? They Might Be Giants?

Curt studies me, then stands up and squeezes out of the room.

“Come on,” he says, his voice drifting away from me. “You’ve got to … I mean,
right now
there is something you must listen to.”

He leads me into the bedroom and there, buried beneath the rubble, is an old record player. It’s covered in dust, but Curt wipes it gently with one dirty sleeve, leaving both sleeve and player dirtier than before. He turns and starts digging through a box of records.

“You will most definitely like me, I mean this—this thing about me that I’m going to tell you. Because, see, T, I can tell you don’t believe we can have the most awesome band ever, fucking ever, with
just the
slightest
bit of practice on our part. But that’s because you are afraid to embrace your true punk persona, well …”

Curt pulls out the record he’s been looking for and studies it solemnly.

“Check this out,” he says. He holds it the way Dayle holds Dad’s old football trophies—the ones we’re not allowed to touch. He slides the record out of the sleeve and offers it gently, holding it up for me to look at.

“This,” he says, “is what I grew up listening to.” I peer forward, looking for the answer to what I’m not embracing that will allow Curt and me to form the best fucking band ever. I don’t see it.

Curt takes the record away before I get a good look and sets it in place. He blows the dust off the needle and there’s a scratchy sound as the music comes out of the speakers, grainy and weak.

I clear a spot on the floor next to Curt and sit my huge butt down very carefully. I’m expecting Iggy Pop or the Dead Boys, but what comes out is entirely more melodic. It takes me a couple minutes to figure out that we’re listening to the Beatles. Curt grins in a lopsided way. He glances at his sneaker and his face turns pink like chewed-up bubble gum.

“When I was a kid, see … well, my mom used to play these old Beatles records all the time. Yeah … and my dad, my
father
I mean, taught me to play guitar, because he was a real kick-ass guitar player. But my mom, see … she taught me to love music. So I was three and Dad would be all giving me this shit, like, practice, practice, practice, but she’d come home and put on these records after work and she’d dance around the kitchen with a bottle of beer….”

Curt stares at the record turning round and round on the record player and for a second I almost see somebody else, somebody who doesn’t fidget and cough. Then he lifts the needle abruptly.

“Anyway, my point is, and this is the point I’m trying to make, is
to like what you like, right? Because we’ve all got our reasons for liking and if you don’t like what you like then you really aren’t liking. So, if you like Smack Metal Puppets that’s cool. But if you like Barry Manilow or Air Supply, then, hell, the power’s still yours so long as you own it. Got me, T?”

It’s an odd little speech, but the strange thing is, I do get it. Somehow if Curt MacCrae can grow up listening to the Beatles, then the Fat Kid can like the Screaming Banshees. I’ve just had my first lesson in Punk 101.

CURT SETS THE BEATLES RECORD
carefully back in its case and starts digging through the other boxes. Every now and then he pulls out something vintage. The Ramones. The Stooges.

He pulls off his sneakers and his feet reek. His socks are stained with everything imaginable and I try not to play “name the stains.” Curt sprawls over the junk as if it isn’t there and I can tell he expects me to do the same. I want to tell him I’m a blimp in a china shop, but after a while I forget to worry about it. Curt pulls out an original Sex Pistols album.

“Oh, yes,” he breathes. “I used to listen to this when I was with my dad….”

I can tell he wants to finish telling me the story, but he puts on the record and gets distracted. He leaps over me, an Olympic hurdler, then runs into the living room, grabs his guitar, runs back, plugs it in, and rips into the guitar part. He picks up at exactly the right spot
without missing a note. The music screams and he imitates each of the Pistols, simultaneously playing everyone, including Johnny Rotten. Then he laughs because he knows he’s insane.

Meanwhile, I am a giant lump watching this virtuoso one-man performance. I don’t even have it in me to be the audience. All I can do is ache until my skin feels parched and stretched from wishing I were him. He’s on his knees leaning backward, making crazy punk rock faces and I swear he doesn’t give a shit what he looks like. I know without a doubt that Curt would play this guitar part in the same way no matter where we were. Live and in concert.

I want that.
I want it bad
. I shift my huge rolls of fat until I’m poised to move.

But then it’s too late. The song ends and Curt takes a couple ragged breaths before falling backward to the floor. He runs his hand over his guitar appreciatively.

“Shit,” he says, “that was awesome.”

It occurs to me then that the last time I let myself go—truly let loose—was a long time ago. In fact, it was third grade. Kelsey Drexler’s birthday party right before my mom died.

Kelsey Drexler was the love of my preteen life, a cute little brunette, who’d invited me
personally
. Her little brother Wally started a water balloon fight and Kelsey and I ran around her yard half-naked, screaming bloody murder. I was eight and didn’t know enough not to be insanely happy. Mom was still alive. I was still a twig. People liked me. It’s been a lifetime and 230 pounds since I felt that way. Until today.

Watching Curt, I make a conscious choice to try to let loose. I don’t throw myself around the room playing air guitar, but I do sing along and even scream a couple times when I forget not to. Curt cranks the music and every time a song ends we engage in vicious battles over what to put on next. I grin the whole time because no one ever fights with me anymore. Even Dayle just despises me loudly,
but Curt swears up a storm when he doesn’t get his way, which ends up being never because once he gets around to calling me a “fuckface bastard with no musical intuition” I always give in. I have the distinct impression he’s enjoying my company.

All the while it’s getting darker and darker, and in the back of my mind I’m worrying, truly I am, but I keep thinking,
Carpe Fucking Diem. I am the Fat Kid and I am having fun
.

WHOEVER MADE UP THAT STUPID
“seize the day” expression was never a teenager. Never a distorted mockery of a human being. There is no seizing. There is no control. Life gives, life takes away.

Everything changes when Curt looks at the clock.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit. We’ve got to get out of here.” The clock hits the sixth chime and Curt morphs into Cinderella—the anorexic princess, not the heavy metal band with the big hair. He starts shoving records into boxes like a madman. He stands up, sits down, stands up again, gathers a bunch of CDs, lets half of them spill, doesn’t seem to notice…. He’s a flurry of motion. A cartoon character on fast-forward.

“What? What’s going on?” I ask, but Curt doesn’t answer. He’s too busy being frantic.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit …” He dumps the CDs in an empty box and trips over me as he tries to get out the door. He sets down the box, runs back in, grabs his sneakers, and puts them on as he runs back out.

I try to lift myself off the floor, but it’s a slow process. I have to
disentangle from the records and claw at the wall to pull myself up. My stubby fingers have no grip.

“What’s wrong?” I ask again as Curt digs through the CDs like a maniac. He takes out six seemingly random ones and shoves them in my hands.

“Listen to these. A lot.”

He stands still for approximately two seconds, then stashes his guitar under the piano and heads for the kitchen. My afternoon has just gone from idyllic childhood nostalgia to the wrong side of an episode of
Cops
.

“What’re you doing?” I huff, my voice rising an octave. “Where are you going?”

Curt ignores me. “Yeah, sorry.” He grabs a plastic Kmart bag, takes a Coke and a package of bologna from the refrigerator, and stashes them inside.

“Back door,” he orders. He doesn’t say it to me, but I follow anyway. I want to jump up and down, wave my huge fleshy arms, but he’s busy unearthing a door to the back alley that just moments ago was blocked by the world’s entire supply of used mops. Curt lets them spill all over the floor then pushes the door as far as it will go. The alley is narrow, and the space created is approximately six inches wide. I stare at it forlornly, but Curt doesn’t notice because he’s madly squeezing his rail-thin body through the gap. I panic.

“I won’t fit,” I say, huffing. “I won’t fit!”

Curt pops out the other side like a watermelon emerging from the birth canal. The bologna falls out of the Kmart bag, and Curt stops for a fraction of a second to pick it up. He looks at me and grins sloppily. It’s a sorry grin. A hey-better-luck-next-time grin. But it’s still a grin. He turns and takes off running.

I’m left watching the exact spot where Curt disappeared. I listen to the hum of the old refrigerator and wonder what the hell just happened.
The kitchen is dark, but bathed in red neon light from the living room and green neon light from the microwave clock. Ho-ho-ho. It’s the Fat Kid Christmas Special.

The evidence of our invasion is strewn everywhere and I realize if someone comes back now I’m dead meat. See page two for the subway scenario. Minus the preserved leg.

I trace my steps backward, huffing as I go. The house is creepy and I have gooseflesh. Acres of it. I start toward the living room then realize my sneakers are still under the bed and have to turn back. I push my way into the minuscule bedroom, squat down, and reach my fleshy hand under someone else’s bed.

My fingers close over first one sneaker, then the other. As I pull them out, the back of my hand brushes against something furry, something that feels like a severed head.
Holy shit
, I think,
it’s all over. I’m going to hurl
. I leap backward, crashing into the dresser, and a thousand perfume bottles tinkle to the ground.

I put on my sneakers but don’t tie them, then bolt as if my life depends on setting the world record for cross-apartment sprinting.

Imagine a rabid elephant. That’s me. I pound through the living room, shaking mirrors and antique ornaments as I go. A set of glass spangles tinkle loudly, and I knock over a green vase, splashing water onto the floor. I don’t stop. I head for the front door and don’t breathe until my sweaty hand grasps the doorknob. The door creaks open and then …

Nothing. Silence. There’s no one there.

I step into the brightly lit hallway looking for the distorted white mask of the serial killer from
Scream
, but there’s only a discarded umbrella, two sets of mud-caked boots, and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. My panic subsides.

I shuffle down the hall bolstered by the light, then open the two doors to the outside. A blast of fresh air carries the scent of exhaust.
The quiet of the apartment is replaced by the sound of car horns and distant reggae. A man and woman are approaching the front door just as I exit. The man lurches forward and the woman is smoking a cigarette, digging around in her purse.

“Fuck,” she says under her breath.

I pass them and the man turns around to stare.

“Holy shit, Hazel. You see that kid? That kid was, like, three hundred pounds.”

The woman doesn’t look up from her purse, but she sighs so loud I can hear it all the way down the street.

“Lay off the booze, Jake,” she says. “Ain’t no such thing as a three-hundred-pound kid.”

I SHOULD BE PISSED.

Curt left. He bailed. He stole stuff, made a mess, ditched me.

But he also showed me his records. And talked to me the whole day, pretending I was going to be his drummer at a real gig. He set up my daring escape.

I can’t stop grinning. I sit on the subway train taking up three seats while all the straphangers glare. I ought to be hating Curt, but all I do is wonder if I’ll ever see him again.

I grin all the way home and arrive approximately seven minutes before Dad will walk through the front door. Dayle is waiting in the kitchen.

“Where have you been?” he demands. He’s standing in his socks and boxers cooking a half dozen eggs. Dayle’s always on some special
diet to gain or lose weight depending on the sports season. When it’s football season he has to gain weight, so he eats obsessively, but when it’s wrestling season he has to lose it all to wrestle in the lower weight class, so he lives for weeks on a carrot and a glass of water. It’s fall, so he’s trying to gain. The eggs sizzle in the pan and my stomach rumbles.

“What do you care?” I snarl. But I’m hoping he’ll give me one of his eggs. “I was with Curt. Practicing. Hey, can I have one of those?”

Dayle makes a face; the funny kind he used to make when we were kids. Back when he just pretended to be annoyed with me. I think that means he’s going to give me one, but he doesn’t.