Grasshopper Jungle (8 page)

Chris Szerba ended up in southern Minnesota, where he met a grocer's daughter named Eva Nightingale. Eva had breasts like frosted cupcakes and skin the color of homemade peach ice cream. Her body was a soft and generous pillow of endless desserts. Chris Szerba's semen found its way into Eva Nightingale's tummy, where it produced a good, cigarette-smoking, Catholic Polish boy named Andrzej.

Sometimes when I wrote my history, I would slip in pages I drew about Krzys Szczerba and his lonely and sad life in the United States.

It was hard for me, at times, to separate out the connections that crisscrossed like intersecting highways through and around my life in Ealing.

It was the truth, and I had to get it down.

And that was our day. You know what I mean.

I took off my boxers and went to bed.

It was 6:01 a.m.

The end of the world was about four hours old. Just a baby.

Johnny McKeon was picking up two dozen donuts at that moment.

Ollie Jungfrau was waking up, trying to decide if he should masturbate or not.

It was just after three in the afternoon in Afghanistan.

Louis, the Chinese cook at
The Pancake House
, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, was taking a shit in the public restroom at the
Ealing Coin Wash Launderette
.

History never tells about people taking shits. I can't for a moment believe that guys like Theodore Roosevelt or Winston Churchill never took a shit. History always abbreviates out the shit-taking and excess consonants.

In about a week, the pieces started coming together.

In a week, we figured out history.

Eventually, we would learn this:

The thing inside the globe, the
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
, wasn't anything remarkable unless it came into contact with human blood.

Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
really
was
contained and harmless inside Johnny McKeon's glass universe.

Tyler dropped that universe directly onto the spot where earlier that day Robby Brees began spelling out
GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME
in his own blood.

The
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
was happy to meet Robby Brees's blood.

Robby Brees was my best friend. He taught me how to dance. We smoked cigarettes. He kissed me. To be honest, I kissed him back. Robby was homosexual. I didn't know if I was anything.

I wondered what I was. None of that mattered. Nobody knew anything about it except for me and Robby.

The man whose scientific company invented the
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
died when his plane crashed into the ocean. The plane's engines were destroyed by billowing plumes of caustic ash. The ash came from a volcano in Guatemala. It was called Huacamochtli. Robby Brees's dad was filming the Huacamochtli eruption at precisely the same moment that Dr. Grady McKeon's jet disintegrated on impact with the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Water is unyielding when you're moving at 500 mph.

We were in seventh grade then. My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, joined the United States Marines that year. At the same moment Huacamochtli was being filmed by Robby's father and Dr. Grady McKeon's body was being torn apart by the force of impact, my brother, Eric, was on his way to boot camp. Robby Brees's dad never came back to Ealing, Iowa. He didn't want to see Robby's mom ever again.

We found this out later:

The
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
said hello to Robby Brees's blood on the asphalt in Grasshopper Jungle.

And the end of the world began at about 2:00 a.m., around three and a half feet away from a discarded floral-print sleeper sofa infested with pubic lice in Ealing, Iowa. One time, Travis Pope unfolded the sofa and fucked his wife, Eileen, on it.

Both of them had pubic lice.

It didn't matter.

History is my compulsion.

I see the connections.

KRZYS SZCZERBA WAS
Catholic.

He smoked cigarettes.

Christopher Szerba was Catholic.

He did not give up smoking cigarettes when he gave up the excess consonants.

All the Szerba boys were cigarette-smoking Catholics until my father fell in love with my mother and married her. He quit smoking, converted, and as a result, his semen created two strong Lutheran sons inside her body.

Their names were Eric Christopher and Austin Andrzej Szerba.

My dad picked up some discarded consonants from the wastepile of history.

It is pronounced
Uhnn-zhay
.

Don't ask me why. It's Polish and shit.

I smoke cigarettes. I hate church. But one day, after I talk to my father about my confusing sexual impulses, I will change my name back to
Szczerba
.

My father's name was Eric Andrew Szerba. My mother was Connie Kenney before she married him.

People from Iowa like vowels and rhymes.

Lutherans in Iowa like John Deere tractors and big breakfasts on Saturdays.

Usually, my dad would only have to stand outside my door and speak my name to get me out of bed for our Saturday breakfast. That morning, the morning after Robby and I went up on the roof of the Ealing Mall to find some shit, my father had to come into my room and shake my shoulder.

“You stink, Austin,” my father, whose name was Eric, told me.

“I have B.O.,” I agreed.

“Ingrid needs to shit,” my father said.

That was how we told each other good morning that day.

I sat up.

I would have gotten out of bed, but I realized I was naked under the sheet. I'd taken everything off when I finished writing, when I went to bed.

No sixteen-year-old boy wants to stand up naked in front of his father.

I thought about my decision to talk to him. I wanted to ask him if maybe he was confused about sexual attraction when he was my age. Or if maybe he was still confused about sexual attraction. Experimenting. Things falling into place. Where else would things fall, if not a place? It's not like things are just going to float away. Gravity works. Dr. Grady McKeon certainly knew that when he was watching the Gulf of Mexico get closer and closer and closer.

Maybe the guys who painted the caves in Lascaux and Altamira were sexually confused, too.

I could not bring myself to talk to my father about sexuality while I was naked.

I decided it could wait.

Things would have to float a little while longer.

My father could tell I was naked. He watched me, like he was testing to see if I would get out from under the sheet.

But I was naked. I wasn't going anywhere.

We watched each other, both of us caught up in eyeballing the palindrome of each other's lives.

My mother took an antianxiety drug called
Xanax
. It was a little blue pill that looked like a tiny kayak. Robbie's mother took it, too. Our moms were like Xanax sisters, except they didn't know much more about each other than first names, who their baby boys' best friends were, and Ealing gossip.

Kayak
and
Xanax
are palindromes.

Robby's mother was named Connie, too.

It was always fascinating to me how perfect things could be if you just let all the connections happen. My history showed how everything connected in Ealing, Iowa.

You could never get
everything
in a book.

Good books are always about everything.

My mother would take her antianxiety drug when she felt stress or panic setting in. Saturday mornings usually meant no drugs. She took her drugs in the afternoons, on holidays, and whenever we had visiting human beings at the house.

“Um. Dad?”

“Yes, Austin?”

“Would you please let Ingrid outside for me so she can shit?”

“No problem, son.”

I got out of bed and pulled on some shorts.

I stunk.

My phone was lying on the floor, under the rumpled boxers I wore the day before. No fire trucks and dogs. They were blue plaid. Iowa was blue plaid. That is the truth.

The battery in my phone was nearly dead.

At 3:45 a.m. I received a text message from Robby. It said:

I'm sorry, Austin.

Robby and I always used punctuation and spelling in text messages.

We both despised abbreviations.

I sent him a message in reply:

Don't be dumb, Robby.

I was certain Robby was asleep at that precise moment. I felt bad for calling him dumb, like maybe he would take it the wrong way and not know if I meant dumb for asking to kiss me or dumb for being sorry, which is what I meant.

So I sent him another message:

You shouldn't worry about me, Rob. Let's talk and have a fag later. Ha-ha. Now relax, and come meet me at SATAN'S after I get off at 5. Bring boards.

I was so confused.

That was true.

I AM POLISH.

My hair is the color of potato peels and I have skin the shade of boxed oatmeal.

Food descriptions work well in Iowa.

Polish kids have natural and persistent bags under their eyes. I think we evolved through a lot of sleepless nights or shit like that. If you read the history of Poland, which I have done, you'd probably just shake your head and say,
That is full of shit
.

I am Krzys Szczerba's great-great-grandson.

That is the only thing I know about myself with absolute certainty.

I think I would like to smoke a cigarette with him. I have a feeling Krzys Szczerba could cuss, had hair the color of russet potatoes, and Quaker Oats skin, just like me. I feel like I could ask him anything. He would tell me what to do.

He came to America when Theodore Roosevelt, a man who apparently never took a shit in his life, was president.

Connie, my mother, drove me to work at Johnny McKeon's
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
that morning.

I did not have a big Lutheran Saturday breakfast with my mother and father because I needed a bath more.

On Saturdays I shave.

I did not actually
need
to shave. It was something that boys in Iowa start doing when they are sixteen, regardless of necessity. I ran the tip of my finger around my lips before applying the shaving cream. Robby's lips had some spiny little whiskers around them. I felt them when we kissed. I found the feeling to be a little unexpected. Also, his lips were thinner, not as heavy, as Shann's. I never thought about it before, how maybe Shann felt spiny little whiskers around my thin, un-meaty lips when we kissed.

I was disgusted with myself.

I called Shann while the bathtub was filling and I sat on the toilet, locked inside the bathroom. My mother and father ate their big Lutheran Saturday breakfast downstairs.

I told Shann I loved her.

She said she loved me.

I was naked, so I knew I was telling the truth.

Also, Shann did not say I love you, too.

Everyone knows
I love you, too
does not mean
I love you.

The
too
makes it a concession, a gesture, an instinct of politeness.

History lesson for the morning.

I turned the water off and slid into the tub. My face began to sweat.

“I am in the bathtub, Shann,” I said.

“Are you naked?” she asked.

“Well, I would be normally,” I said, “but since I knew I would be talking to you, I went out and slipped into a modest bathing suit.”

She knew I was kidding. It made me very horny to admit to her that I was, indeed, fully naked.

“I am totally naked,” I admitted.

Shann told me that she slept well, that she was not scared in her new old bedroom as she thought she would be. But, she said, at exactly 6:00 a.m. there came a ticking sound from inside her wall. Shann explained that it sounded like a typewriter.

Nobody uses typewriters anymore, I told her.

At exactly 6:01 a.m. I was taking off all my clothes and going to bed.

Johnny McKeon was buying donuts.

The
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
was dying off, but managed to wriggle around on three slices of
Stanpreme
pizza we threw in the dumpster, where it wormed its way down the esophagus of its last initial carrier, a homeless man named Hungry Jack, who participated in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children in Vietnam.

Ollie Jungfrau was probably masturbating.

Ah Wong Sing was taking a shit.

Something was ticking inside Shann Collins's wall.

She said the ticking stopped after a moment. Shann used words like
moment
. The way she talked made me horny. I told her if the ticking came again, maybe she could record it on her phone because I'd like to hear it.

She told me she would do that.

I shaved.

“
The Pancake House
is busy this morning,” my mother said when she pulled into the front lot of the Ealing Mall. Then she said, “We should eat breakfast there sometime.”

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “If you want a donut, Johnny always brings coffee and donuts in for me and Ollie Jungfrau on Saturdays.”

“Johnny McKeon is such a nice man,” my mother said.

“Yes,” I agreed, “Johnny takes good care of us.”

She parked almost as far away from the secondhand store as you could get and still be on Kimber Drive. My mother was not very steady-handed at squeezing our Chevrolet between slotted cars in parking lots.

I wore a Modest Mouse T-shirt, the shoes we salvaged from the roof of the mall the night before, clean boxers—Iowa plaid—and loose 501s with a belt. I smelled good. My hair was still wet from the bath I took. I did not like my jeans to droop like Robby did. Boys at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy were required to wear belts and matching socks. We would be called in to Pastor Roland Duff's office if our underwear showed.

Lutherans in Iowa are very modest.

“What is a
Modest Mouse
?” my mother asked.

She had a stretchy thing on her hair. It was green and looked like the waistband from a pair of fat guy's underwear. I didn't know what those things were called. You know, women from Iowa wear them. In their hair. Her nails needed a new coat of paint. They were chipped or grown out around the edges. Apparently, my mother's nails grew much faster than mine did. Real dynamos. She wore a green velour tracksuit with a zip-up top. I guessed it would be called a tracksuit. I'd never seen my mother run one time in my life. Who wants to run when you can kayak everywhere?

“Nothing,” I said. “I don't know.”

She parked the Suburban facing out toward the street, directly across from
Satan's Pizza
.

My mother was very calm that morning.

Maybe all I needed was a tiny blue kayak, to get things to fall into place for me.

I decided I would ask Robby if he'd ever gone kayaking on one of his mother's Xanax before. Probably not. Like me, Robby never even got drunk before.

But we could smoke cigarettes like real dynamos.

“Do you need one of us to come pick you up, Sweetie?” she asked.

My mother called me
Sweetie
when she was calm.

When she said
one of us
, it meant that she anticipated being drugged out by five, and my dad could come get me.

History does show that more of what we actually say is not contained in words, anyway. It's why those cave guys simply stuck to the pictures of big hairy things and shit like that.

“Robby and I are going skating,” I said. “I'll call if I'm going to be late for dinner.”

My mother leaned over and kissed me.

IT'S ABOUT TIME
you met these two:

Ollie Jungfrau lifted half a maple bar to me when I walked through the door to
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
. It was the kind of gesture drunken soldiers at a bar would make when weary battlefield comrades came in from the war looking for a drink.

But it was with half a donut.

“Hey, Dynamo,” Ollie said, winking at me.

Ollie Jungfrau called me
Dynamo
. The first time he said it, I had to look it up. Who says
Dynamo
? People in Ealing, Iowa, do, that's who.

That's another word I'm going to try to erase from history, never say it again. But it is a challenging redirection. I'm from Ealing, Iowa, after all.

I rather wished Robby was there, so we could go have a cigarette.

“Hey, Ollie,” I said.

Ollie panted contemplatively between bites of his donut. He had red stuff on his chin. The front lines of jelly donuts had already been decimated by the panzer division of Ollie's appetite.

“Coffee.” Ollie waved his hand gracefully between a tall paper cup and me, as though he were introducing blind dates at a barn dance.