Out of Whack (3 page)

       “It’s that patch of tar on the street. Don’t move.”

       I tried to remain steady. “Is that your camera?”

       “My dad had it in the attic. You’re moving.”

       He pressed a button on the camera and held it for a split second, then reached over and moved an armored figure (Vantor: Defender of the Scum People) about half an inch. Then he filmed for another split second.

       “How long is this going to take?” I asked.

       “I don’t know.”

       “Can I move some of the figures?”

       “Then how would you be an eclipse?”

       “I’ll move them then stand back up.”

       “Okay, you can move Sorikand and Quart if you don’t knock them over. I’ll tell you how to move them. Only do it a little at a time.”

       I crouched down beside the sandbox. “How about you have the robot kill that guy next to him? He could pop his head off.”

       “I don’t want to wreck my figures.”

       “I’ve got a bunch of figures at home. We can destroy them. I even have firecrackers.”

       And in that moment an instant friendship was formed.

“Friends and Octopi”

       We never did get more than five minutes of the adventures of Vantor taped, though in those five minutes my figures were punctured, dismembered, melted over an open flame, sunk in homemade quicksand, and tortured with minor acids from Travis’ chemistry set. Their cries for mercy went unheeded. Heh heh.

       The rest of the summer was an absolute blast. Travis loved hearing my jokes, though when he tried to tell them himself the results were disastrous. Have you all heard the joke about the string going into the bar? I personally have nightmares about that one, but it’s nice and simple, with a somewhat clever little pun at the end. Except for the time Travis told it...

       “This string walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender says ‘Hey, we don’t serve strings here.’ So the string says ‘Okay’ and walks outside, then he frays himself and ties himself into a frayed knot. So he goes back into the bar and the bartender says ‘Hey, aren’t you that string?’ and the string says ‘No, I’m a frayed knot’ and so the bartender gets him a drink. And then the string says...ummm...he says
something...”

       Sigh.

       What Travis could do is come up with
amazing
adventure stories. He lived for aliens, boogey men, pirates, giant mutant bugs—all that stuff. When we would construct elaborate scenarios with our action figures, he was in charge, and my attempts to interject slapstick into the proceedings were not appreciated. You should all be aware that the Dark Raider would not let himself slip on a banana peel and fall off a cliff. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

       Together we had close to 150 figures from seven different terrible Saturday morning cartoon shows, and Travis knew the full background of each and every one of them. I knew which ones had the coolest guns. And while my contributions to the action were generally ripped-off from the latest episode of the cartoon, Travis’ were entirely original, though strictly within the guidelines of the character and his powers.

       We did other stuff during that summer, too. Neither of us were much interested in sports, which are by definition boring and far beyond our abilities, but we liked to walk through the woods, go to movies, watch enough TV to justify our parents’ concerns about brain rot, and eat lots of candy. Lots and lots of candy.

       It was the quest for candy on one extremely hot day that led to something that I’ll just refer to as The Incident. Our mission for that day was to pick up a pair of Hershey bars each, a new action figure for me, and a new video cassette for Travis’ camera. We stopped at the grocery store first, and were so pleased with its fully functioning air conditioning system that we decided to hang around for a while. So we just walked up and down the aisles, discussing the pros and cons of almonds in chocolate bars, when Travis noticed one of the most wonderful things either of us had ever seen in our lives.

       There it was, waiting for us in the seafood department.

       An octopus.

       A real octopus, though fairly small, wrapped up just like it was a steak. Perhaps your grocery stores contain octopi in abundance, but this was the first time either of us had seen one of them in person. We were impressed. Very impressed. Forget the action figure and tape. We had to have that octopus for our very own.

       So we bought it, along with our candy bars, and hurried home to Travis’ backyard. Removing the cellophane was a simple enough task, but the actual removal of the octopus required a greater degree of bravery. You see, those things are slimy and have suckers. And we couldn’t be
sure
it was really dead, could we?

       “I’ll give you two blocks of chocolate if you take it out,” I said, with the intention of immediately stuffing the rest of the candy bar in my mouth after the task was completed, opening my mouth wide, and inviting him to claim his payment.

       “Uh-uh. I’ll give you one of mine if you do it.”

       “Nope.”

       “I
dare
you to pick up the octopus.”

       That was playing dirty, but it still didn’t work. We decided to pick up the octopus with two sticks, each of us holding one. If you’ve ever attempted to lift an octopus (or any unshelled mollusk, for that matter) with two sticks, you’ll realize that it doesn’t work, especially when the participants are more focused on trying to flip the octopus onto each other.

       Finally we donned protective gloves, each hesitantly grabbed a tentacle, and picked up the creature. Within two minutes our anxieties had vanished and we were tossing the octopus back and forth like a football. We pressed it against the window to see if the suckers on its tentacles would hold it there. We brought out the action figures and gave them a fearsome new enemy with which to do battle.

       Well, even something as fantastic as your very own dead octopus gets boring after a while. We needed to do something special with it. Something glorious.

       It’s worth mentioning at this point that Travis had an older sister.

       Okay, so I wasn’t completely out of my Practical Joke Phase. And since we’d used our own money to purchase the octopus, it would’ve been a waste of resources not to slip it under the covers of his sister Margaret’s bed. Right?

       And so we did. I stayed over at his house that night, but by that evening we’d forgotten about the octopus. We went to bed without giving it another thought.

       Travis was a middle child, but there was quite a gap in ages between his siblings. His younger brother Kyle was four, and Margaret was seventeen. She was always a nice girl, a good student, never got into much trouble. In fact, there was only one secret in her life that her parents would have seriously disapproved of. Every once in a while, not too often (I guess we just have to take her word for this), she would sneak her boyfriend into her room after everyone else had gone to sleep.

       At 1:38 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, there was a piercing shriek. Travis and I hurried out of his room next door to investigate. Travis’ parents burst out of their own room across the hall, and his dad threw open Margaret’s door.

       Pretend you’re Travis’ dad. You see your daughter standing in her room, totally freaked out, and not wearing a shirt. Her boyfriend, a large, muscular type, is desperately trying to get her to quiet down while he pulls on his jeans.

       Do you assume a) she found an unexpected dead octopus under the covers, or b) her large, muscular boyfriend got a little carried away with the hanky-panky?

       The rest of the night was rather unpleasant. It included a really cool punch to the jaw by Travis’ dad, lots and lots of shouting that included “Go get my shotgun!” and a visit from the police. It ended with explanations all around, and severe punishments for all the youthful participants. Though Margaret was technically grounded “for the rest of her life,” her parents paroled her after a month. Travis got one week. After my parents were notified, I got two, which still seems kind of unfair.

* * *

       Summer drew to a close, as those traitorous summers are wont to do. The specter of a new school year hovered above us, mocking us, laughing at our feeble attempts to squeeze as much fun as we possibly could into the last days of freedom.

       The Saturday before homework season began, I spent the night at Travis’ house again. His mom decided that we needed to practice getting up early, and thus sent us to bed at 9:30 p.m. We gave her recommendation of going to sleep ample consideration, ultimately rejected it, and spent a while just talking. We discussed the fact that we were both going to be in Mrs. Talbot’s class, which was absolutely terrifying. It was said that if you looked deep into her eyes you would know what true evil was, and it would haunt you until your dying day. As it turned out, Mrs. Talbot was a perfectly nice woman, and the students she axe-murdered for her unholy rituals weren’t close acquaintances anyway.

       “Know what I’ve always wanted to do?” Travis asked me.

       “Eat your boogers?” I was ten, remember. My ad-lib skills weren’t quite honed yet.

       “No.”

       “Eat somebody else’s boogers?”

       “No. I want to start a story. Do a page of it every single day for the rest of my life. It’d be the longest story ever written.”

       “I’ll help you with it,” I offered. “We can write it together.”

       “Okay, and when we’re not together, one of us will have to write it alone. We’ll keep it in notebooks, and trade them back and forth. And we have to promise to do one page every day, no matter what. Okay?”

       “Okay. What do you want it to be about?”

       “We should make up a brand new super hero.” Travis went over to his desk and grabbed a notebook. He tore out the first few already-used sheets, then picked up a pencil. “We’ll start with his origin.”

       He started to write. I peered over his shoulder.

      
Once upon a time...

      
“Hey!” I said, glancing at his clock. “That killer horse movie is on! Wanna start writing this tomorrow?”

        “Sure, all right.”

       We started writing the next day. We decided to exercise some forethought and title our epic tale “Travis and Seth’s Story,” because you never knew what plot twists might come about and invalidate other titles.

       Believe it or not, we stuck with it. No, we didn’t write every day, and we usually didn’t do the full page, but this wasn’t an idea that we tossed aside after a week or so, like learning the guitar or brushing our teeth. Our hero was a lively, moralistic chap named Trychen who wore gold body armor and could fly despite being weighed down by all that gold. He was a very effective hero, going through villains at the rate of approximately one every five days.

       There were some notable differences in writing styles at first. When I had the story to myself, there were no limits, and as much over-the-top silliness as I could squeeze in. The creation of Butt-Man was one of my more legendary moments. Travis’ contributions were more focused and took the material seriously. He killed off Butt-Man the second he got a chance, though Butt-Man’s byproduct soon rose and tried to seek vengeance. When we were writing together, there was no way to tell what was going to happen. Creative differences flew fast and thick, but we always managed to work it out, even if it meant coming to blows on occasion and threatening to end our friendship on a bi-weekly basis.

       At the end of four years, we had almost five hundred pages written. I’m talking about handwritten pages, so it’s not like we were in Robert Mitchum territory, but it was still one long story. And there were several noteworthy changes as the tale evolved. Females began to play a larger role, with Trychen’s girlfriends often coincidentally having the same names as certain damsels at our school. Instead of my contributions becoming more serious, Travis’ grew more and more silly (I was a bad influence on him), until, by age fourteen, we were writing an all-out comedy novel.

       Well, we were trying, anyway.

       And, of course, our handwriting improved.

“Why Dating Should Be Illegal”

       Did I skip chapter four? This book-writing thing is more difficult than I thought. Oh well.

       I sometimes think the reason we got into comedy was that our lives contained such an overdose of insanity. A good example is our first date (we doubled), which happened in eighth grade and should have been a nice little dinner-and-a-movie deal. Now, lots of people have the First Date From Hell. Travis and I had the First Date From Hell And Seventeen Other Unseasonably Hot Locations.

       Here’s the conversation that led up to the “asking” portion of planning this event, which is, of course, the most difficult step, especially when you’re a dork. It starts a couple of minutes after school has been let out, with me pointing across the school hallway at Marcia Levay. Tall, leggy, dark hair and complexion, great smile with no teeth missing, way above-average looks. She was what we liked to call Bucket Material, referring to the object used to catch all the drool she produced in us.