Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (10 page)

They order a pizza and I hang out behind the counter looking busy. I want to talk to Beth but not to her friends. They smile secret smiles. I do my best to eavesdrop, hearing things that could be innuendos but could also be about a thousand other things in the world.

As I bring out the pizza, I fear the fingers on my broken arm are too weak to hold the tray. Beth will end up with eighth- degree burns and years of skin grafts. I sweat in fear from this unreality, making an accident more likely.

In reality, I get the pizza down fine and even get a thank-you from nameless girl number two when I drop off a stack of extra napkins.

“Here you are, ladies. Pizza is messy no matter how proper the people eating it.” I smile.

Beth laughs and the other girls laugh a nanosecond later, suggesting that they are laughing at her and maybe me, but definitely her.

I offer to get refills and then flee.

Back by the oven, Flip, the owner, asks me to read a receipt to him.

“It says, ‘Philly steak onions peppers provolone.’”

He nods as if I confirmed what he already knew, but I suspect he can’t read words he’s seen a hundred times. Who can’t recognize ‘Philly steak’ when someone orders it every day?

“What’s with the girls out there?” Flip asks.

“How do you mean?”

“You know them?”

“From school.”

Flip looks over at them as I wait for some kind of skeevy comment—something about extra sausage on their pizza or a more direct “I wonder if they want to have sex in my van?” Instead, he tells me to charge them for everything or I’ll get fired.

“No comping! I fire people who give their friends free food.” He goes away and I’m left by the hot oven hoping that Beth will leave before I say something stupid. But then I peep around the corner and see her standing at the counter. Her friends are cleaning up and shuffling outside.

“What’s up?” I ask her. I’m trying not to be weird.

“Hey. That was good pizza.”

“The extra flavor is from not washing my hands.” I wiggle my fingers at her.

Beth laughs. She’s at ease now that her friends are outside.

“I’ve been thinking about your photo-poem,” she says a bit rapidly. “I’m
really
into the idea, so I hope you were serious.”

“I am rarely serious, but I was serious about that.”

“Good. You just—I get this sense about you that you’re really observant. But not that you pay attention and take good notes or something. I feel like you really see things that other people don’t see and that you think about things that other people ignore.”

My face is hot enough to warm up a slice of pizza. I don’t know how to respond to such a compliment.

I think I say thanks, but I would need outside confirmation to be sure.

“So are you saving for a car or something?” she asks, deftly shifting the conversation.

“Nothing that cool.”

“Talk to Jorie at all? Since the party?”

“She’s fine.” I feel like a traitor of sorts. Why am I lying about the state of my world? Can’t I be honest? Can’t I tell her that I hug trees and wonder about ways to kill myself?

“That’s good.” She turns to look out the door. “I gotta go. It was great seeing you!”

Beth looks like she wants to tell me more great things about me.

Or maybe I’m just projecting.

I’m probably projecting. I’m a projector.

For example: The world is not terrible. I just keep thinking it is.

I ASK DEREK ON FRIDAY
if he can take me out to the restaurant where his lady, Sally, works with my sister.

He hesitates.

“If not, it’s cool,” I offer.

“It’s just that I’m going out with her when she gets off work.”

I prepare for some kind of crude comment about the sexual adventure they will embark upon in the parking lot.

“I mean, if Jorie’s there,” I say, “I can hang with her and figure out a way to get home later.”

“I can find out if your sister is working and if you promise you can find a way back home, I’ll give you a ride.” Derek raps his knuckle on lockers as we walk to lunch.

My anxiety over finding a way to get to Jorie for a visit disappears. Anxiety over finding transportation home erupts. (Jorie has no car and I’ve never been on a public bus before.)

“Also,” Derek says, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Oh, dear. Your favors.”

“Don’t be a dick. I’m staying at her condo this weekend and I told my parents I was sleeping over at your house. So cover for me.”

This sounds like a demand, not a favor.

“You haven’t slept over my house since sixth grade, dude,” I say.

“Just do it, all right?” He looks around, then whispers, “She wants to have sex with me in the shower!”

“Then you’d better get some waterproof condoms.”

The confused look on his face is beautiful.

On Friday, Derek confirms that my sister is working, so he picks me up at seven-thirty. We recite jokes along with an Aziz Ansari CD, though it’s getting a little old since we do that a lot. I track how long it takes to get to Fillmore’s and notice that while there are a few Plexiglas bus stops, they are all unlit. Clearly the kind of place where teenagers are mugged, raped, mutilated, and murdered. I might end up running home, screaming like a twelve-year-old girl.

The restaurant is packed. The hostess seems to know Derek. Perhaps he’s met Sally here a few times already, which would be stupid considering she’s engaged. I guess visiting your engaged restaurant shift supervisor girlfriend at her place of employment doesn’t seem like a bad idea in Derek World. But who am I to judge? I haven’t been out of the house two weekends in a row since I was born.

Derek sits up at the bar, acting like he owns the place. He head-nods to the bartender. We get sodas. I try to figure out what all the little buttons on the soda hose do. It occupies my mind while my eyes scan the crowd for Jorie.

At eight, Derek’s lady comes over. She’s done with her shift, doing all those little things food service people seem to do when they’ve just finished a long shift: hair tussling, back stretching, sighing.

I expect them to hug or even for her to touch him on the back or arm, but she’s all professional-friendly. You would think they were cousins or friends, not a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-one-year-old woman living out a strange romance.

“Say, I never asked you,” Derek’s lady says, “what happened to your arm?”

“Oh. It got caught in a cotton gin.”

Derek and I laugh, but then she asks what a cotton gin is and I just admit I’m kidding.

“He got hit by the short bus.”

“Oh my god!” she says.

“It was kind of embarrassing.”

“No kidding,” Derek says. He’s not devoted to making me feel terrible, though. “Actually, he was saving an injured bird.”

“That’s so sweet! Who would risk themselves for something like that?”

“Yeah. I mean, thanks.”

I feel good.

Sally goes to her car and Derek lingers behind for a moment to see if I’ll be all right.

“Remember, I’m sleeping at your house, so if for some insane reason my mom talks to your mom—”

“Yeah, man, go have a swinging good weekend.”

“You’ll be okay getting home?”

“I’ll figure something out.”

Derek leaves me at the bar with a brotherly shoulder punch. I tell him not to get his lady pregnant.

After fifteen seconds I realize I’m a sixteen-year-old kid taking up a barstool, so I ask the hostess for a table or booth in my sister’s section.

Jorie is halfway through her “Welcome to Fillmore’s” greeting when she realizes it’s me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Her voice is tired but happy.

“Surprise?”

She sits across from me for a second but then looks around and gets back up.

“Don’t want to get fired. They don’t like us sitting with customers.”

“Even family?”

“Especially.” She taps a pen against her forearm. I can’t help but wonder if the skin of her arm has been marred recently.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Good. Tired. Are you here with someone? A date?” She looks hopeful, like she wants to be the cool older sister, but I disappoint her.

“Derek dropped me off. I thought we could talk for a bit. Not trying to get you in trouble.”

She says she’s off at ten and then has plans to go to a party that I can come to.

“It’s not a crazy thing. Just some friends. Good people. They’ll like you.”

I have some money that’s supposed to go toward my therapy. Instead, I get cheese fries, drink three huge sodas, and plan to give the rest as a tip, leaving me with no bus fare. I don’t even know how much a bus costs, but I definitely won’t have enough.

As the last hour of Jorie’s shift passes she drops off plates of random crap: burnt onions, celery sticks, gummy bears, peas. I build an island for the gummy bears with a celery slide.

At ten, Jorie comes over and falls into the seat across from me. I feel numb and overwhelmed after sitting in one place killing time, basically trying to shoot smiles her way to help her through.

“You look beat,” I say.

Jorie looks down at her shirt and holds part of it out for me to inspect.

“How did I get this?”

“Is that steak sauce?”

“Or the blood of that unruly birthday boy.”

“Did stabbing him affect your tip?”

We laugh and head outside to walk to her apartment, which she says is about ten minutes away. I tell her it’s a convenient location and think that maybe she’s doing okay until I see the place. She rents the upstairs of garage.

“I know, it’s a shithole,” Jorie says while shouldering open the door. “The worst part is that there’s flying ants or termites or something.”

There aren’t any noticeable bugs when we walk in, but it could be because it’s dark.

The apartment is essentially one big room—there’s a mattress on the floor with rumpled blankets. The kitchen has blood-red cabinets and black and white floor tiles. It looks like a 1950s diner where customers routinely get stabbed. There’s a sort of living room area, though Jorie has no TV, no couch, no table, and only two cruddy-looking used floor lamps like the kind that my mom always said would catch fire and burn the whole damn house down.

Jorie and I used to play a game, inspired by my mother’s constant stories about her childhood, called Poor Kids. Basically, we’d spend the day in our backyard and pretend to eat roots and grubs, sew our own clothes, and collect dirty water from an imaginary well. Jorie liked to be the hunter, which was fine with me since I always liked to pretend to cook. (My specialty: mudburgers cooked in the sun on a piece of slate.)

This apartment makes me feel like Jorie is playing games again.

Jorie changes in the bathroom and I worry about this party and my curfew and wonder if termites are eating their way through the last bit of wood holding everything together.

“There might be something to drink in the fridge,” she yells from the bathroom.

I open the fridge and see three cans of whipped cream and a bowl of what looks like cake mix.

Jorie comes up and peeks in.

“I didn’t have any food except for a cake mix. I tried to make it with just water, but it tasted like shit. Needs eggs and oil.” She laughs.

“At least you have whipped cream, right?”

“My friend Mike brought that over to do whip-its.”

“What’s that, like a drink?”

“If you inhale the gas in the can it fucks you up. I hate it. I felt like I was falling through the floor.”

“Can’t that kill you?”

“I wasn’t actually falling through the floor.”

“No, the gas.”

“Oh. Yeah, that can definitely kill you.”

Two dudes pick us up; they seem nice enough. They even turn down the radio so that we can all talk. Jorie tells them that I’m a reader and good in school.

“Yeah, I’m a big nerd.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” the dude driving says. “I wish I did better in school. I wouldn’t have to install ventilation systems.”

The other dude says the money’s good, and they start talking about people they work with. I hear them but don’t listen.

The party is at some house rented by seven people that may or may not have known each other since elementary school. It’s hard to follow the conversations because of competing radios, conversations, and a guy trying to impress people with an out-of-tune acoustic guitar.

I am the youngest person in the house. I am the youngest person on earth. I follow Jorie around, trying not to sit next to her for fear her friends will think I’m lame, but I stay in the same room, taking up corners or sitting squished on couches. I drink a beer to buzz away my butterflies. If I drink too much I might forget to go home.

Someone passes me a clay pipe. I ask what it is because I think it might be rude to just pass it along, but asking what it is seems like a stupid thing to do. No one laughs, though. These people are so nice!

“It’s sticky icky, icky, icky!” someone says in a high-pitched voice.

“You are not hip enough to pull off that line,” someone else teases.

Before I can even pass the pipe along, Jorie jumps up and takes it from me.

“Dudes! Not my brother.”

“I was just being neighborly,” the guy says.

“It’s all right,” I say. “I can just say no.”

The room erupts in laughter, except for Jorie. I realize too late that I sounded like one of those terrible anti-drug posters in the gym teacher’s office. She laughs sarcastically and goes to another room. I stay on the couch and try to disappear completely.

Long after my curfew, Jorie finds someone to give us both a ride home. I think the guy’s name is Dutch. Or Hutch. It’s got an “utch” sound.

Jorie sits in the front seat. I’m nervous; Utch seems very high. I want to be cool and not embarrass my sister, who has gone out of her way to make me comfortable all night, even after I accidentally made everyone laugh at her. Seems like I’m always guilty of something that ends with Jorie being punished.

“Holy shit,” Utch giggles, “was that purple thing a
dinosaur?
”

“What?” Jorie says.

“It was a purple rhinodactylus! One of those flying things!”