White Man's Problems (2 page)

As he settled into in the soft, deep, red quiet, he glanced at the photos near his head, on the table at the end of the couch where he lay. The old black-and-whites of his parents in Mexico were crowded out by a group picture of the Kingsleys and Evanses at the wedding. There were lots of sports action shots and team plaques off to the side and a very special Polaroid of Casey and Manny on the golf course at Arroyo Seco. Manny kept looking, though, and found the one he was after this morning. It was Opal when she was a toddler in his arms at the beach. She was looking at the camera from over his shoulder. Manny's back was turned, but his profiled face smiled up at her. He looked at his little girl closely now, as he had done a million times before, paying particular attention to those big, beautiful, brown, and round eyes.

The Plot To Hold Hands
With Elizabeth Tremblay

I
t is not cool that people around here think it's ok. It's bad enough that grown men are going to beauty salons, sitting under hair dryers, walking around like poodles, and saying “Do you like my perm?” Bad enough that we have pet rocks and mood rings. But if that isn't enough for you, if that doesn't show the ridiculous state of affairs here in late-seventies America, consider this: we have to live with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, thinks it is ok for the Philadelphia Phillies' away uniforms to be baby blue. They wear goddamn baby blue uniforms on the road. Am I the only one who is ashamed? And while we're on the subject, they screwed up the P in Phillies, making it round and puffy and completely stupid looking. The kind of P the Pillsbury Doughboy would pick if he was running the club.

I am sitting in detention. My first one. Two hours of forced confinement after school. It's jail-like. Actually, there are many similarities between my school and a penitentiary. We went on a field trip to the state prison at Graterford a few months ago—which is pretty bizarre when you think about it, but that's another whole road—and the thing I remember most is that it kind of looked like our high school. Both are made of reddish brick, concrete, and feature wonderful painted-cinder-block interiors. Both have lots of gray railings and windows with chain linking inside the glass. I don't know how they do that with the windows.

My English teacher, Mr. Matthews, must get an extra twenty bucks to sit through this, which he probably needs if you go by the way he scrunches his face as he balances his checkbook. He sees me come in today and says, “Budding, what are you doing here?”

I don't want to get into the whole thing, so I say, “I got into trouble. It's a long story.”

He gives me a distrustful look. “Ok, I'll find out what you did. But you're going to have to work while you're here.” He gestures at the other fifteen detainees in the room. “You don't get to just sit around like those other morons.”

I look around for some help, but seeing the scuzzballs in detention with me, I realize Mr. Matthews kind of has a point.

He thinks about it. “I want you to get something out of this,” he says. “Otherwise it's no punishment. Write something. I won't read it.”

Let me go through my day. At 6:32 a.m., the clock radio goes off in the bedroom I share with my little brother. It's the same freaking jingle every morning: “Another great day is with us, and to start it out happ-i-ly, we'd like to be the first to
say good morning and to welcome you to W-I-P…in Phil-a-del-phia…
” My mother calls me just as I fall back to sleep. “Ro-man!” It's about fifteen degrees outside. I know this because my dad accidentally shut the door of our room after we went to bed, so no heat came in all night, which means the day starts with us seeing our breath. I take my school clothes into the bathroom because I will get frostbite if I walk back to my bedroom in a towel.

My mom is so bleary she can't make breakfast. Nobody wants to eat anyway, because it's so frickin' cold and early. I toast one piece of Wonder Bread and go to the bus stop with my little brother, Bill. I'd like to point out here that he gets named “Bill” and I get named “Roman.” That gives you an idea of my parents. We live in a place called Stuckley, named after a guy who, best I can tell, is famous for owning a farm. At the bus stop, my hair is frozen under my hat and, once again, I am freezing my ass off. I look down the street for any sign of yellow. Bill and I huddle with the other kids like a stranded bobsled team waiting for the rescue vehicle.

We get on the bus, and Anthony, the driver, gives me five bucks. The guy always takes the Eagles, which is really not smart. We are on the bus from 7:10 till 7:40. The heaters blow like crazy, and it gets hotter as the bus collects kids. Since I'm wearing a big jacket over two shirts and a sweater, I start to sweat. And as I heat up, I start to fall asleep again. It's like being tortured. The only thing that pulls me out of it is that Elizabeth Tremblay gets on when we get to Riddlewood, where the nice houses are. She sits two rows in front of me. She is the hottest girl in the school and I am in love with her. I give her a little wave when she walks near me, and she says hi. She sits with her friend Jane Ragni, who is a cheerleader, too. I usually try to say something funny, but there is no opening today.

Ok, maybe everybody else thinks Jane is the hottest girl in the school. Not me. For me it's Liz; she's my dream girl. She has brown hair, green eyes, the right kind of freckles, and a beautiful, if a little bit round, face. She's got a nice body with good boobs. But the thing about Liz is her butt. It's the best in the world. She doesn't have a little bony behind like Jane's. Liz' is a nice round thing. It looks like two horseshoes side-by-side.

Or, to put it another way, imagine the letter W. Most girls in ninth grade have butts in which the middle part of the W is made up of straight, angular lines. Not Liz Tremblay. With her, the W is made with big curvy lines, like the W for Wilson Baseball gloves. Or the W the Pillsbury Doughboy would make if he was making a W—which would be a better use of the Pillsbury Doughboy's time, by the way, than making baseball unifor
ms.

After we herd off the bus, I have ten minutes to drop my books off at my locker and get to my first class, which, of course, is gym. Next thing I know, I'm putting on my uniform, which I always forget to take home. It's so not clean. It has a little bit of an ammonia smell. Jock strap, shorts, and shirt. For some reason, the phys ed teacher, Mr. Lambert, is obsessed with wrestling. I swear to God we've been wrestling for eight months. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:00 a.m. I can be found wrestling Peter Logatelli. Now, I like Peter. Nothing against him. But he weighs 280 pounds. I mean, Jesus Christ, they're going to cut him out of a house someday. And they don't give us any kneepads or anything.

Today I am getting smushed as usual by the tubolard Logatelli when Lambert comes by. “Sit-out, Budding. Perfect time for a sit-out!” When I try to sit-out, which is just a dumbass wrestling coach way of saying “get the hell away from the guy,” I go nowhere. My legs just flail around under Peter's sumo-like mass. My knees and shins make a skidding noise as they get burned on the mat. I'm leaving skin behind like a molting snake.

The other annoying thing about gym class is you have to take a shower when it's over. So, about ten minutes before the bell, it's off we go from the mat to the locker room. I strip down naked and take my towel to the shower. A couple of points here: First, I always forget to take my towel home, too. It's gray—at least now it's gray—and it's about as big as a standard washcloth. It doesn't cover me at all. Not fun. Second, it's ice cold in the locker room because some idiot left the door to the football field open. It's a goddamn pattern. It's back to freezing my gonads off until I go into the shower, which is about eight thousand degrees and ignites the burns on my legs. Then they make you step on an athlete's-foot machine, which is basically two metal pedals that squirt disinfectant onto your feet. I am grateful for the school's interest in my hygiene—I really am—but I don't think that thing works.

The forced march continues as I go to geometry, which starts at 8:49. (Every minute counts with the assholes who make up this schedule.) I have to sprint to make it, causing perspiration again. But once I get there, I realize I don't have anything to do, because I finished the problems last week. There's a rumor that today we will dissect frogs in sixth-period biology. You have to understand that this is a very big deal for the ninth grade. We've never done anything like that before. The girls are all scared shitless.

My geometry teacher is Mr. Lutz, an old crabby guy. The kids hate him. Today, five minutes into the lesson, he gets mad at a football player, Jeff Zwarts, for talking. He sends him to the blackboard and proceeds to give him the business. He says, “Draw a quadrangle.” Zwarts does it. “Ok, Mr. Zwarts, that is your head. You are a blockhead.” Laughter erupts. Then Lutz says, “Now, Mr. Zwarts, please make the best possible circle you can.” Zwarts makes a pretty decent circle. “Draw the radius of the circle.” Zwarts has no clue. Lutz looks at me. Just as I was afraid of, he says, “Mr. Budding, draw the radius.” So I make a face that says don't kill me to Zwarts as I go up to the board and make a line from the outer edge of the circle to the middle. Lutz says, “Zwarts, put your nose on the point at the end of the radius going away from the circumference, which is the diametric center point of the circle.” Zwarts sticks his nose against the board, and now his back is to the rest of the class. “Ok, Mr. Zwarts, we will get back to you.” He leaves Zwarts there till the bell thirty-eight minutes later—9:44.

Third period is music, which starts at 9:52. The teacher is Mrs. Weaver, who is a hippy with hippyish body odor. I don't know what's so musical about her. It's like all hippies are assumed to be musical. Anyway, she has us playing recorder, which is basically a plastic tube with holes. At the beginning of class, she sends us to the front of the room to pick an instrument out of the laundry bin. The school that is so worried about my athlete's foot apparently does not care about the canker sores I will get from a recorder used by six other students per day. Disgusting. But that's nothing compared to what happens when thirty-five ninth graders start trying to play “The Entertainer.”

See, the thing about recorders is that after you blow on them awhile, saliva starts coming out the bottom. I'm standing next to Ernie Bundt, with whom I am going through life for the sole reason that our names fall next to each other alphabetically. No one can produce more slobber than Ernie. There's the fountain of youth, there are fountains of knowledge, and then there's Ernie Bundt, a fountain of drool. The worst part is Liz Tremblay is sitting right behind me. If you have a crush on someone, slobbering out of your recorder is the kind of thing you try to avoid. I accomplish this by going into a lot of stylish flourishes. I raise my horn horizontally like I'm Wynton Marsalis every time I think spit is coming out. That's kind of gross, though, because if I go too high the drool comes back into my mouth from the other direction.

Speaking of Liz, she's smart—maybe the smartest cheerleader in the history of the school. She speaks French and knows about art and all. We're in the “Academically Talented” classes together, which seems a little brutal on the other kids. My friend Hubie is in the C section. My dad says you might as well say “fill it up” when you put a kid in the C section. My mom smacks dad when he talks like that.

Anyway, the classes thing gives me a lot of playing time with Liz. The problem is she hangs with the cool people, the kids in the normal classes, like the A and B sections, which are made up of her cheerleader friends and the jocks and the whole road that goes down. In other words, she's in with the normal people. I don't have the same kind of hookup. My cred is very high with the smart crowd, but when it comes to the cool kids, it's like you have to hide that you're intelligent. It's a dilemma.

She sits next to me in seventh-period study hall. This gives me the opportunity to wear her down with conversation and jokes. We've actually started having real long talks. I try to read up on things that will interest her, like witchcraft and the Rosenbergs. I even watch what I wear, which is tough. To tell the truth, sometimes I worry she won't stoop down to going out with me because it would be socially unacceptable. Other times I think, what the hell? I'm a pretty cool guy. She should go out with me. I get jealous thinking about her with anyone else. Man, I don't like the way that feels. It gets me way down deep, like in some molten center of my body, like the ball of fire in the middle of the earth. Sometimes I wake up at night wondering if that ball is going to burn through me and once it's done turn into a huge, exploding fire that destroys the world. I'm a little nuts like that.

Music ends at 10:47, and we head to the cafeteria for lunch. We push the orange trays along the aluminum railing, and from behind the Plexiglas barrier they serve us spaghetti with meat sauce. Dessert, their apology for the entrée, is a little square of red Jell-O with some half-assed whipped cream on top. At this point, I'm not that into eating anything, let alone this shit. It isn't yet eleven in the morning, and I have gone from freezing my ass off to sweating to freezing my ass off and then to sweating again. I've taken two showers, been crushed by Logatelli, been treated for fungus, blown through an unsanitary musical instrument, and now I'm supposed to eat hamburger meat from yesterday's sloppy joes. My legs are badly burned, and I am tired. And there is still the prospect of frog dissection.

On that front, the girls are all in a lather. Frogs are the talk of the lunchroom, and everyone is yapping about it as I go to my next class, which is called, strangely,
Health
. That is the catchall term for everything from sex ed to malaria prevention to making pancakes. Don't ask me why, but health class is taught by a rotating group of gym teachers. That makes sense to someone somewhere, as does the fact that the course also covers driver's ed. Our teacher for the driver's ed unit is—you guessed it—the wrestling-obsessed Mr. Lambert. He doesn't like to talk much off the mat, so he just shows us movies. Today's is
The Smith Method of Space Cushion Driving
. Some guy named Smith drives around in a '57 Pontiac convertible demonstrating his revolutionary style of driving, which mainly consists of giving the guy ahead of you some room. That's the big deal: don't tailgate. But the hilarious thing is Smith is talking to the camera the whole time. At one point, he almost smashes into a guy in a Plymouth making a left. I look around to see if anyone else is catching this, but the whole room is asleep—tough to stay awake after spaghetti.