Like We Care (16 page)

Annie McCullough, meanwhile, was finally given her break. In the aftermath of the Casey incident, with Hutch no more interested in indulging Annie’s career fantasies, she and the boys were ordered to stay on the road and roll tape on anything they found that rocked the R
²
Rev way. Whatever they sent back to New York would be used as B-roll, or maybe incorporated into the net’s farcical “news” packages, which were almost entirely devoted to thinly-disguised promotions of new CDs and ongoing court appearances by R
²
Rev’s brightest stars.

That, of course, had essentially been Annie’s own proposal to Hutch, which he had stolen and returned to her stamped with the de rigueur stamp of the Hutch Posner Genius. But where his intent was for the crew to simply document skateboard dipshits and rhyme-silly gangstas flaunting their pimp hands, all with the requisite snarling and smarm, Annie was primed to look elsewhere. She had a camera crew, an expense account, and very little interest in keeping this job much longer.

She was dangerous.

T
hey sat there at the table, the two of them: Joel and Marty Kasten. It must’ve been a Saturday, two weeks after their previous Saturday, because these were the only times father and son ate breakfast together.

The custody agreement was actually more generous to Marty, but Marty told Joel a long time ago that Joel’s mom was “busting his balls on the whole visitation thing just to fuck with me.” If Joel had ever doubted his father, or if he had ever had the courage to prove his doubts, his mother would’ve been delighted to tell him that his father just wasn’t all that interested in seeing him more than a couple times a month.

“Welcome to the club,” she would’ve enjoyed saying.

It was a big day, this Saturday, because it was the first time Joel had escaped the sports page. Practically since tee-ball, Joel Kasten had been a fixture in the box scores and game summaries of the local paper, which expended buckets of ink documenting the on-field excellence of this kid who made winning seem so effortless.

When Kyle Hoffstetler’s fastball had connected with Joel Kasten’s face, it was above-the-fold, front-of-the-section news, the paper’s lead sports columnist wringing his hands at length about the cutthroat nature of high school sports that had led to this near-homicidal attack on the town’s finest young athlete. The day after Hawthorne East collected their trophies for winning State, the paper, in tribute to Joel, gave it scant notice.

But now, here he was on the front page of the Metro section, all for having instigated a protest of some kind down at the Happy Snack. According to the story, a group of Dickinson High seniors had declared war on the popular mini-mart, and on the manufacturers of the products sold there. The reporter and photographer, who were familiar with Joel from his athletic achievements, instinctively knew whom to speak to.

“We’re just tired of the adults, who make this stuff and sell this stuff, assuming that we’re going to keep them rich by giving them all our money,” he was quoted as saying. “We turn on the TV, or we open a magazine, and all we see is billions of dollars being spent on advertising trying to trick us into buying stuff. And we’re not so stupid that we don’t know that they wouldn’t spend billions if they weren’t pocketing fifty times that much. Off of
us.”

This was all Todd’s initial rant, rendered far less dogmatic by the simpler mind of Joel Kasten.

“We’re just shutting the faucet off for a while to tell them we know what’s what.”

The arrival of the newspaper team, followed quickly by crews from all four local TV news outlets, had solidified the boycott. For the first few days, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the protest action from the general milling about that would’ve taken place in the parking lot anyway. Joel and his lieutenants put in more time than usual, trying to intimidate the younger students from spending, in part by doling out provisions from the stockpile collected. But the front had begun to spring leaks almost as soon as it was mounted. Handfuls of students—particularly those not at all impressed by the dynamism of Joel Kasten—continued to spend freely at the Happy Snack, enduring the taunts of the true-believers as they passed.

But the appearance of the TV cameras focused things nicely. After all, these were children raised on media scrums, the chaotic, live-as-it-happens news rodeos that had been running on cable seemingly non-stop since the day they were born: O.J., Lady Di, Monicagate, Michael Jackson. Every day, at every hour, there seemed to be something going on somewhere which compelled TV cameras to suck up the images of gathered simpletons and blast them live to the entire world.

It had begun to feel almost like a birthright, this sense that eventually everyone would find themselves in a crisis worthy of saturation media coverage. Unconsciously, people would rehearse their man-on-the-street responses to questions posed to them, even picture in their minds the precise text and font of the witty, provocative placards that would single them out from the pack and bring them on-air glory.

And now, like a dust devil rising from nothing in the New Mexico desert, here was a news frenzy all their own, right in the middle of the Happy Snack parking lot, all because Joel and his friends had decided to stick it to Daljit Singh.

The cause and effect couldn’t have been more stark: Make some noise, get on TV. Make more noise,
stay
on TV. You could actually step through your television screen and become programming. You could scratch your ass on mini-mart asphalt, and folks throughout the land would watch.

Lives there a person strong enough to resist such temptation?

Early on, though, when the story was confined to the newspaper and therefore not yet an officially sanctioned hullabaloo, Marty Kasten wasn’t impressed.

“What are you doing?” he asked his son over the breakfast table.

“What?”

“This.”

Marty jabbed at the story in the paper. Joel was secretly thrilled with himself, but he was seventeen and therefore obligated to offer only minutely shaded displays of disregard.

“Dunno.”

“Your mother know about this?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“She
let
you do this?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Here it came. Marty grunted, and contained within the grunt was this: If
I
had a hold of you, this kind of shit wouldn’t be happening. If your mother had done better by me, if I had married better, if life hadn’t gutted me from my balls to my throat and screwed me out of what I had coming to me,
you’d
still have a father who could keep you in line. You caught a break the day I decided I wanted out, son of mine.

It carried a punch, this grunt. Joel felt a sick, dull ache in his stomach every time he heard it. He wondered if maybe he was getting an ulcer.

“Some of the men who own some of these stores that share this parking lot—I know them,” said Marty. “They don’t need this.”

“We’re just trying to make a point.”

Marty clucked derisively. “Yeah, I know. When you’re seventeen, everybody all of a sudden has a point.”

“Did you have a point when you were seventeen, Dad?” Joel was being sincere. He really wanted to know.

“Yeah, my point was keep on the right side of my parents, do the work I was told to do, and shut the hell up. You get out into the real world, and you learn really fast that nobody much cares what your
point
is. Do your job, do it well, everything else will take care of itself.”

Joel looked around his father’s sterile, two-bedroom apartment, and noticed for the first time how much of his expensive furniture was given over to chrome and hard corners. Every time Marty found a new girlfriend, she contributed something to the decor, since Marty couldn’t have cared less about such things. But even though he had a steady stream of young women doing his interior design—Joel’s good looks were definitely a product of his father’s genes—the apartment always looked empty to Joel.

Marty chuckled as he quoted his son from the paper.

“‘Teenagers spend one hundred billion dollars a year on stuff, and their parents spend another fifty billion dollars on them. If we all of a sudden went away, all these companies would be screwed. Maybe they need to start thinking about that.’”

Marty looked at his son skeptically. “Where’re you getting this?”

The implication—that Joel was too dim to form an opinion of his own— smarted. “It’s something I heard,” he said quietly.

“Well, I want this to stop. Are you even going to football practice anymore?”

“Yes.” But not as much.

“This is the time, you know. This is when college recruiters show up at your games to have a look at you.”

“Dad, I’m not gonna get a scholarship for football. I’m not that good. It’s gonna be baseball or nothing.”

“Yeah. We saw how that worked out.”

“I had three schools interested in me! All I had to do was pick one.”

“I did not put all my time and all my money into your baseball career to have you playing for some second-tier college in the middle of some farm town. The Majors are signing prospects right out of high school.”

“Dad. I’m a really good ballplayer, for here. Maybe compared to kids from other towns, bigger towns, I’m just. . . okay. You know?”

Marty waved it away. “When spring training opens, teams are gonna see the holes on their bench. They’ll take another look at you, wonder how they got so lucky to find you still available, and we’ll let them fight over you. Meanwhile, football will keep you focused, keep you in shape. I do not want you missing any more practices.”

Joel finished his cereal. They were waiting for him down at the Happy Snack. “Whatever.”

Marty started straightening up the table. He took the morning’s paper— including the Metro section—and threw it in the trash.

It was not a hostile gesture. It just didn’t matter.

“I have to go into the office for a few hours today. This friend of mine really wants to see a movie, so I figured she could join us. I’ll buy you both dinner.”

Joel grimaced: “This friend of mine,” like they were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn or something. When Joel had been up late the night before, channel surfing, he had found a twelve-inch vibrator in the cushions of his father’s buttery leather sofa.

“You know,” said Joel, “maybe just the two of you should go. I kinda made plans.”

Marty tensed. “
We
had plans.”

“Yeah,
we
did, and then. . .” Joel trailed off. There was no point. If he had to act the asshole teenager in order for both of them to get what they really wanted for the evening. . .
whatever.
“I just wouldn’t count on me tonight.”

This was great! This was better than Christmas: Marty Kasten got to act wounded. He was 42 years old, and he got to take an emotional jab at his teenage son to start his day.

Hoozah!!

“Fine,” he said frostily, grabbing his briefcase with an accentuated crispness and heading for the door. “Make sure I know where you are.” “I’ll draw you a map.” Marty stopped angrily. He thought he might have just been slighted. “
What?
” “Nothing. Bye.”

H
e stepped from his car, wary but intrigued. Under normal circumstances, he would’ve driven elsewhere to buy his cigarettes more discreetly. But not today.

“Hey, Mr. Kolak,” Joel said brightly. He and his crew had seemingly taken up permanent residence in a full quarter of the parking lot. If the protest stretched out much longer, Frank knew the city and the Happy Snack people would challenge their right to congregate on private property to push such a flagrant political agenda. Now
that
would be interesting.

“How goes the battle?”

Joel nodded toward the Channel Six news team, interviewing a grim-faced Bobby Slopes. “That makes all four stations. Channel Fifteen sent over Debbie Fedder. She’s
hot.
”

Wad Wendell stood behind Slopes, pretending to pick his nose for the camera. Joel sighed: these were his foot soldiers.

“They saw a lot of that at the Boston Tea Party, too,” Mr. Kolak said wryly. Joel processed this, then chuckled. It killed him when adults joked with him like he actually had a clue.