Hairstyles of the Damned (23 page)
Cut to:
Mike in the Osco Drug parking lot, leaning against the motorized merry-go-round, lighting a cigarette, digging into the back pocket of his pants for his wallet, unfolding it, digging out a foil-wrapped condom, and saying, “You got to be cool about this shit. You don’t wanna find out you got a kid, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“So you got to change it like every few weeks,” he said. “Or else.”
“Or else,” I said, repeating.
“So here,” he said.
Cut to:
Mike, sitting on the brown sofa in his basement in his white skivvy underwear, rolling a joint, looking over his shoulder every so often toward his small, paneled-off room, shaking his head and smiling. Him saying, “I’m gonna need that rubber back,” and winking, because Erin McDougal was in his bedroom waiting, and me unfolding my wallet to hand it to him and smiling.
Cut to:
Mike running like hell out of the Osco Drug, grabbing my arm as he runs, booking full speed across the parking lot, past the train tracks, over the fence, and into the cemetery, me hardly breathing, my heart up in my ears, and him digging under his jean jacket and tearing open a brand new box of condoms, handing a few to me, saying, “Ribbed,” and out of breath, “you know, for her pleasure.”
“Yeah,” I said, hunched over, trying to breathe.
“This one,” he said, planting one of the small foil circles in my hand. “I can tell this one is going to be lucky.”
Cut to:
Yearbook photos of every girl I have ever met, thought of, or looked at: girls Mike introduced me to, girls like Gretchen who I was so sure I was in love with, girls I have never even spoken to, like the one who worked at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall, girls, girls, all who had seemed so impossible, so out of reach.
Back to:
I looked over my shoulder at Dorie who was still laughing, kicking her feet up and down quick to make the sheet rise and fall like waves, mumbling, “Hurry up, I’m cold.” I turned, opened the wrapper, climbed back under the covers, and said, “OK, you’re gonna give me some pointers, right?”
“Duh,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s, you know, my first time.”
“Duh,” she said, rolling her eyes again.
In the basement, Dorie and Mike and I were doing the Ouija Board and trying to contact some spirits, right, and Mike said it was all bullshit anyway and went in his room to call Erin McDougal to, you know, make nice, and so it was just Dorie and I playing, our hands touching the small white plastic pointer, kind of moving it from side to side over the board with all the letters and numbers and words and everything, the two of us giggling and laughing, and I asked, “Did you ever get a spirit to contact you before?” because it was her Ouija Board, and she said, “Yeah, in junior high, me and Jenny Elwood used to do this all the time,” and I said, “Are you sure you guys weren’t just moving it yourselves?” and she said, “Duh, no,” and we kept moving the pointer around and around until it kind of stopped by itself, kind of getting very hard to push, and then I didn’t know if it was just Dorie pushing harder or what, but Dorie asked, “Are you a spirit trying to contact us?” and the pointer went to “yes” and so she said, “Are you a good spirit or a bad spirit?” and it spelled out “G-O-U-D,” and Dorie said, “Maybe he is a little kid or something, you know, like he can’t spell,” and I said, “Yeah, maybe,” and then she asked, “Are you a young kid?” and the pointer went right to “no,” and Dorie asked, “How did you die?” and it began to spell out, “S-I-C-K,” and Dorie and I kind of looked at each other, startled, and I began to try to resist pushing the pointer at all, and it was really moving, and so I said, “Does Dorie really, truly like me?” and Dorie looked up and smiled, kind of surprised I asked that, I guess, and like that, the pointer slowly slid over to “yes.”
At my locker before school even began, I was kneeling, picking through the random shit I had stuffed inside, looking for my Religion and Chemistry notebooks, kind of in a daze, thinking about nothing but Dorie—her hair, her hands, her face—and singing this song she always sung, “Changes” by David Bowie, and not really knowing the words but “Cha-cha-cha-changes, turn and face the …” I didn’t know what he sang next so I just sang, “Turn and face the day,” because it was like the beginning of the fucking school day, even though later I found out the line was, “Turn and face the strange,” which would have worked too, had I known. I was down on my knees, shoving mounds of homework assignments, notebooks, failed tests, single random sheets of loose-leaf paper with my band names on them, and trying to retie my black tie at the same time, when out of the corner of my eye I saw John McDunnah, his big, square, blond face and oddly Herculean shape looming down the hallway toward me, and before I could register what was going on I felt the egg come down. I knew what it was right away, the feeling of it was exactly the same: the sharp strange sting of the eggshell against my scalp, the runny-sticky foul odor of it leaking down my neck, the yellowish globs on my white shirt and black pants, the clumpy whiteness growing hard in my hair. I looked him in the eyes as he was walking away and he was laughing his jungle-hyena laugh, nodding to his two pals, and all at once it made total sense. The first time had not been an accident, not really. He had picked me, known who I was at least, or what I looked like—which must have been like an easy fucking target or a wimp or a pussy or someone who he knew would never do anything back. Realizing that, well, that was what fucking hurt about the whole thing.
In Dorie’s room, I was lying in her bed after school, reading, and her mom was still at work (her mom was a receptionist at a hospital) and I had my shoes off and so did Dorie and I was reading this dumb book about serial killers for my history project and she began to slide her bare foot against mine and I pretended to ignore her and then she took off her shirt and started kissing my neck and I kept on reading and she started growling, which she did, and she was dry-humping me and unbuttoning my pants and I kept on reading, and then she had her hand down my pants and her fingers were on my crotch, inside my pants, and I started getting excited down there and not knowing what to do, and so I kept on reading, and I felt her hand grab the whole thing and Dorie shouted, “Hurry it up, Romeo, my mom will be home any second!” and she dug under her bed for a rubber and we started doing it and As a boy, Pee Wee Gaskins saw a cobra kill a live rat at a carnival. In a confession he later wrote, this was the first time he felt violence’s attraction. Later named America’s meanest killer, Pee Wee spent most of his life in prison. In 1969, after getting released for the murder of an inmate, Pee Wee began killing at an unprecedented rate. He saw a difference between his “coastal kills,” victims he found while driving around the roadways of America who he killed for pleasure, and the “serious murders,” victims he killed for very specific reasons. His victims were usually found along the coastal highways, where every few weeks he would go to try and silence his terrible feelings of “not belonging.” the serial killer book fell off the bed and landed on the floor and scared the hell out of us both and I jumped out of the bed and we figured out it was just the book and we both started laughing, and it felt so good to be there and I said that to her before we started going at it again.
We got busted pretty bad by Mrs. Madden, finally. I guess it was only a matter of time. Mike and I had devised this kind of chemical pressure explosive, perfect for blowing the hell out of mailboxes, and that was the thing that did us in. Some dude in Mike’s gym class told him that if you took a two-liter plastic soda-pop bottle, put a big ball of tinfoil inside, poured in some mercuric acid—which is like some fucking metallic kind of acid you can get at any hardware store—then sealed the bottle top, the acid would eat away at the tinfoil and create like this tremendous gas that would cause the whole thing to blow.
We had to try it. We got like three soda-pop bottles and a roll of tinfoil, went to Osco and bought a little container of this acid stuff, and one night we just went outside, walked to the end of Mike’s block, put the tinfoil in one of the bottles, poured in the acid, sealed the top, shoved it in a mailbox, and started running. In a few minutes, the bottle blew like a pressure bomb, knocking the little red wood mailbox right off its post, like three feet into the air, completely destroying the fucking thing. We blew up another one right away, crossing over to the other side of the street. This time we blew the hell out of a plastic barnshaped mailbox, knocking it off its post, but not completely. It was still dangling by some kind of wire, I guess.
We were all set to do the last one when some angry neighbor-type individual came out, some big dude in a white T-shirt who grabbed Mike around the neck just before he could pour the mercuric acid in. He grabbed me by the back of my shirt and marched us over to Mike’s, rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door hard until Mrs. Madden appeared. She was drunk off her ass, her eyes all red and glazed, looking very happy and stupid, all in her yellow nightgown, smoking, with a very amused face.
“Nahhh,” she said, smiling. “These two aren’t mine.”
“Mrs. Madden, these kids just blew up two mailboxes and were going for a third.”
“They’re no longer my responsibility,” she said. “If you want, you can take it up with that boy’s father,” and she pointed to Mike with the end of her lit cigarette.
“Mrs. Madden,” the angry neighbor mumbled, clearing his throat, “I don’t want to have to get the police involved, but …”
“You go ahead and get the police involved,” Mrs. Madden shouted, “and you’ll be wishing you hadn’t!”
The angry neighbor rubbed his chin, taking a step back.
“What the heck do you mean by that?” he asked.
“I mean everyone has eyes, Mr. Hickman. Everyone …” she slurred, “has. Eyes. Understand?”
Mr. Hickman, the angry neighbor, shook his head, looked at Mrs. Madden, then at us, all up and down, and then he walked away, shaking his head. He stopped a few feet from the front porch and said, “It’s no wonder they act like that.”
“Tell it to the judge!” Mrs. Madden shouted, kicking the screen door open. “Tell it to the judge, you phony!”
Mike and I started to walk inside and Mrs. Madden laughed, snapping her drink up, some Canadian Club whiskey, heavy with ice, tossing her head back.
“You two,” she said, closing the door. “You two don’t live here anymore.”
“What?” Mike said. “You can’t do that.”
“I can do whatever I want,” she said. “I am the official homeowner.”
“Mom,” Mike said, holding his hands out. “You have to let me live here.”
“I’ve done everything I could,” she whispered. “This is all I can do.”
“You’re really fucking serious?” Mike asked, covering his face.
“Unless you’re ready to live by my rules,” she said, looking down at her poorly painted red toenails and frowning.
“Mom …” Mike whispered, and it seemed like he might start crying.
“I’m gonna take off,” I said, heading for the front door.
“No, this affects you too, orphan boy,” Mrs. Madden said, laughing at her own joke. “Where are your parents anyway? Don’t they care where you’re at every night of the week?”
“No,” I said. “They got their own problems, I guess.”
“Huh,” she said, looking me up and down. “That’s a good answer.
Well,” she added, taking a sip of her drink, the ice clinging together. “Michael, you know how I feel. I’ve had one asshole in my life and I’m not going to take the same from you and …” and then she stopped. Just in the middle of her sentence, just like that. Her eyes got wide and full of tears and she kind of bit her lip and looked at Mike and then at me and said, “I can’t anymore. I’m sorry,” and ran off into her bedroom, crying.
“I’m gonna go,” I said, whispering. “What are you gonna do about her?”
“What can I do?” he asked. “Neither one of us is changing.” He lit up a cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “I just think, fuck. It would be nice to be treated like a kid once in a fucking while.”
OK, the most haunted place in the Midwest was supposedly this old cemetery in the middle of a forest preserve called Bachelor’s Grove, which was somewhere in the middle of the south suburbs. Mike had been told about the place by his older sister Molly when she was still around, and we had talked for months about going out there to see if there really were any ghosts or anything but we never did, because we had no way to get there, but Erin McDougal—you know, “Mike and Erin, So Sexy 1991”—had a car. So one night in the middle of the week, when Mike and Dorie weren’t working, all four of us hopped in Erin McDougal’s used Toyota Camry and drove out to 127th or wherever it was, parked on some tiny subdivision street, and hiked through the forest preserve in the pitch-black dark. Right away, Erin McDougal was squealing and giggling and holding Mike’s shoulder, and Dorie stopped to make out with me every couple of feet. I’ve got to be honest, it was kind of fucking freaky, being out in the woods all alone in the middle of the night and everything, I dunno. Maybe I had watched too many fucking slasher movies, but all I kept thinking about was a guy in a fucking burlap-sack mask chasing us down with a chainsaw or something. Mike was the only one with a flashlight, and we found our way along a narrow trail, then to a second, larger one, and then there were the gates of the small little cemetery—green wire and kind of covered in branches and ivy. It was very quiet; only the sounds of the nearby highway and crickets and Erin McDougal’s nervous giggling.
We crept through a hole in the fence, each of us walking around a little on our own, checking out all the super-old headstones, some like from 1850 and everything. Dorie jumped out from behind a tree, landing on my back, tackling me, and kissing me on the mouth, and then running off again. In a minute or two, we all sat around the largest headstone, FULTON, it read, and it was big and rectangular, and Mike lit up a cigarette.
It was dark, some blue night sky breaking through the branches overhead, as I felt for Dorie’s hand. It was hard to see anything much but lightning bugs and brief flashes of cars from the highway. I could kind of make the shape out of Mike’s head and Dorie’s nose and Erin was a big dark blur. I looked out of the corner of my eye every so often, making sure no cop or weirdo sprung out at us. Dorie leaned in close to me and I could smell her hair and I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world just then.
