Zombie (15 page)

“How long have you been into photography?” I ask.

“Chopography,” he says, handing me a postcard that reads
Chopography Exhibit by Mykel
, advertising his art show at the Daily Grind downtown in Fell’s Point. It’s similar to the flyers we handed out the other day, but this is smaller and has a word I’ve never seen before. “chopography,” I say.

“I take pictures of shit, then chop them up and piece them back together. Chopography.”

“I know this place,” I say. “It’s near my brother’s apartment.”

“You should come.”

“What is it that you do exactly?”

Mykel makes scissors with his fingers and clips them along a line in front of his face.

“How do you chop pictures up?”

“Do I hear hard-hitting questions?” Mr. Rembrandt asks, walking behind us, clapping his hands. Nasty nubs. I look at his freak hands and want to ask
him
a hard-hitting question.

“We’re good,” Mykel says. He hands Mr. Rembrandt a postcard.

“This is great, Mykel,” he says, waving the postcard like a fan.

“You should come,” Mykel says. “Might see something you like.”

“I just might.”

Mr. Rembrandt moves on to a pair of guys picking out rims in a car mag.

“What do you get out of chopping people up in pictures?” I ask Mykel.

“Satisfaction,” Mykel says. He sits up in his chair, rubbing at a dark stain in the wood of his desk. “Satisfaction in the act. I feel good when I do it.”

“Why do you do it?” I ask.

“Why do dogs bark?”

“But you chop up pictures and reassemble them like Frankenstein’s monster,” I say. “Why?”

Mr. Rembrandt announces that we will be presenting our
partners at the front of the classroom. He asks who wants to go first. He asks who has the stones to be the first to face the firing squad. He says, “Volunteers. Volunteers. Volunteers.”

Mykel’s hand goes up and volunteers on my behalf. Mr. Rembrandt gets giddy with excitement, clapping his hands, calling us up; waving us on with his freak hands. As we approach the front of the room, I ask Mykel again why he chops up photographs. I ask him what he gets out of it.

“Honestly,” he says, blowing hot air into closed fists, “so I don’t do it for real.”

Immediately, I think of tongue extractions.

T
he cafe is curiously quiet—tables crowded with bodies, sport coats hung from the backs of chairs, book bags held between feet, hands delivering fistfuls of food to anxious mouths. It doesn’t take a seasoned anthropologist to be able to analyze the dynamics of the high school watering hole. Like any animal in the wild, the Byron Hall boy stays to his own kind, careful not to stray too far away from the pack.

Stoner table by the lunch line for obvious reasons—shaggy hair, baggy clothes, smoke heaps of weed behind the lecture hall building. Barely a Limp Dick all around.

Band table next table over—awkward kids in thick-rimmed glasses, hair gelled in strict parts, acne attacked and boil-ridden foreheads. A Half-Windsor and Limp Dick split.

Miscellaneous jock tables all over the place—plaid jackets, plaid shirts, plaid ties, plaid pants. Chatter about getting laid and wasted on cheap beer and expensive vodka. Windsor knots.

Sorry, sad-sack loser table near the fire exit—normal kids who don’t play instruments, or participate in sports, or excel in skateboarding, or smoke weed, or drink anything but energy drinks. Clip-on ties and Limp Dicks.

Computer geek table in Fuck Central near the vending machines—super smart kids that carry calculators the way most people carry car keys. Limp Dick, absolutely.

Drama club table—the loudest kids in the school with coiffed hair and a fine knowledge of the latest dance music. Expertly knotted Half-Windsor’s.

Debate table—future lawyers and bankers of the world. Windsors tied with precision.

Blue Jay Weekly table—the newspaper kids in crisp, white shirts, perpetually ink-blackened fingers. Windsor knots loose around necks.

Artist table—bright colored shirts that don’t match their bright colored pants. Big, fat ties in Limp Dick knots.

Jeremy Barker table—nonexistent. I walk with my head down past the soccer jock table, where Cam Dillard and the plaid monkeyfuck bastards sit flicking each other in the ear. I want to punch the douchebag and his gang of retard robot monkeys. At a table in the middle of the room I see Mykel and an open spot across from him.

“Anyone sitting here?” I ask him, pulling the chair back. I drop my brown bag lunch on the table. “You hear we got Mr. Vo today in Christian Awareness? Brother Larry’s out.”

“Nice,” Mykel says. “Mr. Vo’s cool as shit.”

“Who are you?” a kid says. “And what the fuck are you eating?”

“Jeremy,” I say. I open the tinfoil from my pepperoni sandwich and take a huge bite.

“You’re white,” he says.

“I’m friends with Mykel,” I say and feel completely weird about him saying that I am white. Because he’s black and if I had said what he said to me, but said “you’re black” instead of “you’re white,” what would have happened?

“Nice to meet you,” I say.

“Jimmy Two,” he says.

“Jimmy what?” I ask, leaning closer to him.

“His name is James James,” Mykel says. “We call him Jimmy Two.”

“The fuck kind of sandwich is that?” Jimmy Two asks. He puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me away from him.

“Large-cut pepperoni sandwich on whole wheat with mayo and lettuce.” The tinfoil of my sandwich is open on the table like a body during surgery. It’s smells spicy and sweet.

“Smells like shit,” Jimmy Two says. “Don’t bring that shit to our table. Goddamn guinea food at the BAC table, boy.”

I wonder for a moment what the fuck BAC means and when I look at the faces of the guys sitting around me I get it. Fuck. Double fistfuck.

The Black Awareness table—every black kid in school belongs to this club. And no one sits at their table unless they are, well, black. Well-dressed. Gold chains with crosses looped around necks. Chunky watches, loose on their wrists. Trimmed facial hair cut close to the skin, well-manicured like a lawn. Ties tied in different knots, tied with the utmost care and attention. Casanovas. The rowdiest table in the cafe. The center of the room. The table nobody fucks with. The BAC—the Black Awareness Club.

“Smells bad, Jeremy,” Mykel confirms. “Seriously, close that shit up.” He bends the edges of the tinfoil over my sandwich.

“I can’t sit here anymore,” Jimmy Two says. “Fucking sandwich is making me sick.” He stands and pushes out his chair, but it tips back and crashes to the floor, rolling sideways, rocking back and forth on its legs before settling into a cold silence.

This is when it begins—the entire cafe screams the word
dork
.

Starts small, at first, a few kids from the band table saying it into fists covering their mouths. The jock and artist tables follow suit. The stoners and debaters after that. The newspaper boys and computer and sad sack kids. Every table, all tables, joined in a total collaborative union. A choir of kids howling. The stoners and sad sack losers spit
motherfuckingdoooooork
. Half a dozen voices mix in a few high-pitched
geek
s, stretching the
eeeee
like bubbles rising up from the bottom of the ocean.

“Jimmy Two got dorked,” Mykel says, laughing.

“What’s happening?” I ask Mykel.

“How do you not know about dorking?” Mykel asks.

The cafe:
doooooooooork
,
doooooooooork
.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The cafe:
geeeeeeeeeek
,
motherfuckinggeeeeeeeeek
.

“Dork, motherfucker,” Mykel says to Jimmy Two, punching the
air. “You got fucked up, son. Motherfuckinggeeeeeek.”

The
dorking
shifts again as someone yells
faggot bitch
beneath the other voices. It doesn’t have anything to do with Jimmy Two, I don’t think, but has everything to do with him. Jimmy Two climbs on to the table, standing on the table now, and throws his arms out like he is commanding an army. He looks terrifying up there, like a giant ready to crush us all.

Rightly so, the cafe goes silent.

“All y’all motherfuckers,” he says, grabbing his junk, turning to show the entire cafe his hand on his dick, jostling it for effect. “All of you, on my dick!”

The cafe is dead, everyone trying to act as though nothing ever happened.

Brother Lee stands on top of a chair in the middle of the room and slaps the side of a cowbell with the butt of a drumstick. How he has ready access to a cowbell and drumstick I’ll never know.

Jimmy Two hops off the table, picks up his chair and sets it upright. Brother Lee rushes to his side. He’s a full half a person shorter than Jimmy Two.

“Anyone interested in joining Mr. James in detention today can feel free to continue acting a hoodlum,” Brother Lee yells.

“Brother, the chair was an accident,” Jimmy Two says. “It wasn’t on purpose, I swear.”

“Mr. James, do you jump on tables at home?”

“No, Brother.”

“Two days of detention—one for chair and one for table.”

“Brother, Jimmy Two didn’t mean to knock over his chair,” Mykel says.

“I appreciate your concern,” Brother Lee says. “You have good friends, Mr. James. Now you have something to confess to today.” Brother Lee walks across the cafe, patrolling from table to table, doling out detention like food to the homeless, taking Jimmy Two with him, making him push in chairs along the way.

“What did he mean
confess
?” I ask, dropping my sandwich into my bag.

“Reconciliation, man,” Mykel says.

“Reconciliation?” I ask, completely unaware.

“A sacrament,” he says. He zips up his book bag. “Like marriage. And baptism.” Mykel hands me a sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s mandatory,” Mykel says.

“For what?” I ask.

“Mandatory to be forgiven,” he says. The rest of the BAC pack up their lunches, slide on their sport coats and leave the cafe for class. “Today is the first one of the year.”

And apparently this goddamn thing is madatory.

T
here are no new jokes in my bathroom stall, but there is some new graffiti.

A stick figure with big tits and a hairy vagina stands in front of a smaller stick figure with a large penis pointing in her face. A thought bubble above her head says, “I’m Jeremy Barker and I heart big dick.” I spit on the cuff of my sleeve and rub the picture, smearing the ink, making the tits and penis look bigger by accident. Fuck. Me.

I stole a
Vogue
from my dentist’s office last month and am reading it now. Every model looks tall and skinny, practically naked, high heels, never smiling. I look through the advertisements like a scientist for a photo of a model smiling. The only one I can find is of a man smiling. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked, a white bedsheet pulled over his lap. Behind the man is a naked woman, who rests her hands on his shoulders, pressing her tits against his back in bed as she whispers something in his ear. He is looking at a silver wristwatch on the nightstand. She is not smiling, but he sure is. The advertisement is for some expensive-looking brand of watch, but the tag line at the bottom says, “A man never needs convincing.”

The door opens and two guys enter, standing at the urinals, one urinal open between them. I lift my legs to the toilet seat, holding my breath.

“I’ve heard rumors that this is the bathroom where dudes come to get it on.”

“Who told you about that? You know what? Never mind.”

Both urinals flush. Water sprays from the spigots as they wash their hands. The kids pull paper from the dispensers, wiping their hands like they’re trying to rip away their skin before tossing the crumpled towels into the trash and leave. The bathroom resumes a quiet state as the flushed water fades away inside in the tiled walls.

I slip
Vogue
into my bag next to the remnants of my pepperoni sandwich and walk towards the door to leave just as it opens. For some reason, I’m startled and turn around and walk back towards the urinals, like I had just come in here. It’s Zink and he stalks a urinal into submission. I approach the line of urinals, dead focused on urinal etiquette, something I learned from Dad years ago. Urinal etiquette dictates at least one open urinal should exist between each man—the buffer urinal. I settle on the urinal closest to the wall, leaving two open between us, and unzip my fly, locking my stare on the words
Stop Looking At My Dick, Faggot
scratched into the wall in front of me.

“Given Friday’s mixer any thought?” he asks, arching his back, hosing the urinal cake.

I’ve done well at avoiding Zink since the bathroom incident, that is, until now.

“Got to be there, baby.” Zink shakes his dick. “It’s like religion. It’s like a sacrament—
fraternization
.”

“Will
you
be there?” I ask.

“Everyone will be there,” Zink continues. “Chicks and dicks. Fights and dikes.” Zink flushes the urinal, pressing the silver handle with his elbow. He walks to the sink and washes his hands, leaning into the mirror, peering at the pores of his nose.

I flush the handle with my elbow too.

“Have you given any thought to what you’re going to wear?” he asks.

“I have this red sweater.”

“Barks. A sweater? No. You have to wear something awesome. Don’t wear khakis. Khakis are for holidays and hospitals.” Zink shakes the excess water from his hands and then wipes them on his corduroy pants. “A button down shirt unbuttoned with a
wife-beater underneath. Or a polo shirt. Spike your hair up. Open your clothes up. Throw a necklace on. Glow stick. Something. But for God’s sake, no sweater.”

I wash my hands.

“If you have a pierced ear, that’s good too,” he says. “I don’t have my ears pierced, but I know guys who do and they say it works like gangbusters.”

“Gangbusters?”

“If you decide to get your ear pierced, make sure it’s your left ear. Not your right. Left is right and right is wrong. It’s this whole thing.”