Palo Alto: Stories (12 page)

There was another kid working off community service hours; his name was Brian and he went to the other high school, Gunn. He was Asian, and had a tall head and a square haircut, so he looked like a number 2 pencil eraser. He was a smart kid but he had two hundred hours of community service because he made a bomb at school.

One afternoon when he and I were in the elevator bringing up packs of toilet paper from the basement, I asked him about the bomb.

“It wasn’t a bomb,” he said, like he had been waiting for me to ask. “It was supposed to be a joke. I mean, I’m good at chemistry and I knew what I was doing, I’ve done it a bunch of times before. It was supposed to be a smoke trick, that’s it. All this smoke was going to come out of the drinking fountain, and everyone would get scared, big deal. But the guy I did it with fucked up and put the pipe too far into the fountain, so there was no room for the smoke to get out and the whole thing exploded.”

“Oh fuck,” I said.

“It was bad. The cement went flying and there were flames and a bunch of backpacks got completely melted and a few kids got burned on their backs and heads. One girl had her hair burned off on one side.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Yeah. What’s worse is I got expelled. And I was supposed to go to Duke next year, and they pulled my scholarship.”

For a smart guy Brian seemed dumb, the way his huge head bobbed around when he talked. Just before we got to our floor he asked me if I liked the old people.

“They’re okay,” I said. “They’re just like big children.”

“They fucking smell,” he said, and then the bell dinged and the doors opened and he walked out.

Crafts for the old people usually meant drawing with crayons, or stringing beads, or making cat’s eyes with yarn. At first I just sat and watched; their weak fingers had difficulty gripping things and some of their wet mouths hung open. On the third week I started drawing them. I had put in a lot of time in drawing classes, especially since the last arrest. In
the evenings I didn’t work with the old people, I would go to life drawing and portraiture classes at the Palo Alto Art League. It was just this cool old building that was actually pretty close to the Towers. My teacher, Mr. Wilson, was this wily old guy with a beard like a wizard who wore all denim, every day.

I started bringing my sketchbook and sketching pencils. I usually just drew the old people’s faces. I would draw life in their eyes even though many of their lights had gone out. I would capture their decaying skin with as much realism as possible. Wrinkles within wrinkles, blotches, hair in wisps. And their necks like fowls’: bone protrusion, saggy-soft flesh, goiters. I drew all of the people on my floor many times. The orderlies didn’t care that I hardly helped because they were worse than I was. They were all young, and argued in Spanish and laughed around the orderly station; and the guy orderlies would tease the girl orderlies, and they all would flirt; but when they dealt with the old people they were mean and cold, as if all the old people were animals.

“Those are cool pictures,” Brian said. “They make me think of death.”

“I’m trying to draw them with some dignity. It doesn’t seem like anyone else cares,” I said.

“It’s hard, man. Who wants to care for someone who has lost his mind and motor skills and can’t take a shit without help? That’s why you have all these stupid assholes here, to wipe their asses for them.”

“But the orderlies don’t care about these people.”

“No shit,
because
they have to wipe their asses and change
their bedpans and listen to their insanity
every
day; we only have to be here twice a week. Imagine if you were here every day.”

“I hope I die before I ever come to a place like this,” I said. Brian said I probably would because I smoked cigarettes.

I drew one woman more than all the others. Her name was Tanya. I liked her because of her smile and her eyes. That was all, she wasn’t any smarter or more coherent than the rest of the old people. She just radiated kindness.

I’d draw her in all different ways. Her face with its cross crinkles, like bunched cloth around her eyes; her mouth: wrinkly soft from so much smiling. I’d draw her full-bodied; grinning in her wheelchair, sitting over the beads that she would thread and drop, which bounced, sharp-sounding, on the floor; or in the TV room, hunched in her sweater: birdlike, brittle, her chair angled slightly away from the television because she wasn’t really watching. And her smile always like a child’s.

One Thursday, during craft time, when they were all coloring with their crayons, I placed two of the drawings I had made of Tanya on the table in front of her. Tanya was working on a red house; the jagged red scribbles shot all over the page and into the blue mountain she had drawn in the background. When I put the pictures down she stopped with the crayon. The color was called “Watermelon.” She looked at my pictures. They were good; one was of her face and caught her warmth, the other was a picture of her in her chair, hunched and staring at nothing. She picked one up and then the other, and then she cooed.

“Ooooh, these are nice, very nice. I don’t play with games, but I like this so much. My daughter come, and she walk good.” Then Tanya put them down and was drawing again. I thought she had already forgotten about me, but as she was going over the jagged marks of the barn with Watermelon, she said, “I’m drawing a barn. The place I grew up in when I was a little girl. My daddy said, when peacetime come to the horses, then we all sleep. Sleep, sleep good, you think?” And then she stopped drawing and looked at me like she wanted an answer.

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and she smiled and all the warmth I liked came into her face, and then she went back to drawing.

The next day was Friday. In auto class Barry said his parents were leaving for some Mormon thing and he was thinking about a get-together at his house that night, not a party but a group of people to celebrate the full harvest of his plant. I said I would think about it, but I knew it would be him and April all over each other.

After school I went to the Art League like I usually did on my days away from the Towers. I had a class from four to seven and another from seven to ten. It was me and a bunch of older people and one young Asian girl who was pretty good. There was one model per class. In the early class the model was a guy named Ogden who was about fifty-five; his body was muscular but his skin hung a little loose. The teacher, Mr. Wilson, walked around with his gray beard and bald head, and denim shirt tucked into his jeans. He would lean over and give suggestions to people.

I was drawing in a different way than I usually did. Usu
ally I would try to be as exact as possible, like a Renaissance painter, but all that seemed like bullshit suddenly. The drawings of Tanya did something to me. I think I had really captured her, they were my best drawings, but it didn’t mean anything. Everything was changing, things felt different, but I wasn’t sure why. I was drawing Ogden in a much looser way than I usually did. Usually I would just do one drawing per pose, but I was doing five to ten and letting them drop on the floor. Mr. Wilson stood next to me and held his chin in his hand.

“Going fast. Really fast,” he said. I said I was and kept drawing.

“You know, Picasso drew fast,” he said. “He could draw a dove in sixteen seconds, and they’re great, right?”

“The doves? Yes.”

“But that sixteen seconds had six
decades
of work behind it,” he said, then he dropped his hand from his chin and smiled through his beard. Most of the other students had heard him because he talked pretty loudly, and they all approved of his wise observation, grunting and saying, “Ahhh,” and “Oh, how true, how true it is.” Wilson went on: “Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had
mastered
the
masters
that he broke tradition and became Picasso. He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn’t enough. Technical skill is never enough. He needed to find his
voice
. We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it. The technical stuff needs to become second nature.” Everyone agreed with this part too. Wilson said quietly to me, “You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.” I stopped drawing. Wilson went on: “I used to go to art classes
with him. He was always trying to break away from classical form.”

One of the ladies spoke up. “Sylvester Stallone, the
actor
?”

“That’s right. He’s a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.” Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit. Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy. “He did write
Rocky,
after all.”

During the Stallone discussion, Ogden held his pose. I tried not to listen and draw, but something had gone out of me. I picked up a few of the drawings that had dropped to the floor. They looked like a kid’s drawings, except they were of a naked man.

In the second class we had a woman, Beth. She was about forty and large: her breasts hung heavy and low so that the skin stretched thin at the top of them, and her belly had folds. She was great for drawing, but I wasn’t in the mood. Wilson had killed my motivation for the fast drawings, but I didn’t have the patience to do it the old meticulous way either. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I just drew her belly and shaded it and went over it again and again until it wasn’t any good. I thought about bodies decaying and my own life shriveling.

Wilson was going on about his near-death experience again. He had had open-heart surgery six months before and almost died. He loved to talk about it, and the ladies and old guys loved to hear it.

“. . . It’s true. I don’t care how much attention we devote to the
body
in here, I
know
there is a spirit, I
experienced
it. Whatever it is that makes me
me
had lifted away from this earth
bound state and I was on my way, I was
on my way.
” He was laughing at his own enthusiasm and some of the women were laughing too; a few had stopped drawing to listen. “Excuse me, Beth, for talking about the body so much while you’re posing for us, but I think we should all think about this
while
we draw the body. The body is the vehicle for the
spirit.
We can’t draw the spirit, we can only draw physical things, but
through
those physical things you might be able to intimate something of the spirit
underneath
. At least
try,
don’t just draw Beth, draw her
soul
. Because it’s
there.
I am telling you, when I was going toward that light, something said, ‘Cy, nope. Nope, nope, nope, you’re getting a first-class tickeroo back to earth, you better do good by it.’”

Usually I liked Wilson, but he seemed different now, like a clown. After class, I stuffed all my drawings into a trash can. Beth came out of the bathroom with clothes on and saw me trashing the drawings of her. She was wearing blue sweatpants and a black hooded sweatshirt like she was a regular person. She didn’t say anything.

Instead of going home, I started walking toward Barry’s house. I didn’t care if April was there, I was ready to get high and not think about anything. The night was cold and I hunched with my hands in my pockets and my sketchbook under my arm, and there was a low orange moon, almost full, and huge because it was so low. And I didn’t care.

I got to Barry’s a little after ten thirty; I walked through the ivy-lined pathway on the side of the house, and the heart-shaped leaves against my face were cold. At the back of the house the curtain was closed behind the sliding glass door
that led to Barry’s room. I heard voices and I tapped lightly. Barry’s sea lion face appeared, scruffy and round. When he saw it was me he smiled and slid open the door.

“Welcome, motherfucker,” he said. It was warm and dark inside. He had his lights off and his blacklight on, so the Zeppelin poster and the Crumb
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’…
poster were glowing in bright greens and pinks. On the floor there were about eight people sitting in a circle.

“Teddy,” someone said, “siddown and get ready for the magic carpet ride.” I sat down and I saw that it was Bill. He put his arm around me for a second and squeezed my shoulder. He must have been excited because that was a lot of talking and touching for him. Fred was also there, and Ed, and Ivan, and Ute, and Jack Canter, and Tim Astor. No girls; no April. Barry continued packing his green three-foot bong.

“The skull bong!” said Fred. And everyone else said, “The
skull bong
!” Because the bowl of the bong was shaped like a grinning skull.

“And the official first crop of the Chambers homegrown!” said Barry, and everyone cheered. Then he put the bong to his mouth and lit the bowl, and in the light from the flame his round face turned orange as he sucked and the water bubbled, and the glass of the base was thick with smoke. Barry pulled on the stem and the smoke went up into his throat. He held it in and made little guppy sounds and then let it out and coughed and everyone cheered.

The bong went around, and when it got to me I sucked as hard as I could, and when I saw the green tube was packed tight with smoke I sucked it up like a soul. It went right to the
center of me and I knew that that one hit was going to take me over. I let it out and choked hard and by the time I got my breath back I was already high. I didn’t mind Bill or Fred or anything. The bong kept going around and I started smiling.

Bill patted me on the back again. “See, Teddy, all is
gooood.
It’s like we’re at the fucking
beach
.”

“The beach?” I said. Bill was smiling so big, so many teeth.

“Yeah,” he said, and giggled. “Can’t you feel the sun, buddy? We’re at the fucking beach.” He really liked that idea because he was looking up at the ceiling with his arms spread as if there was a sun up there and he was soaking up the rays.

“You’re a Mongoloid,” I told him. He laughed.

“A mongo-what?” he said, but he didn’t want an answer because he started laughing and couldn’t stop.