Hairstyles of the Damned (28 page)

Finally, Gretchen and Kim came out of the side school entrance, Gretchen with a load of books, Kim fooling around and pretending to be limping when she noticed I was watching. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Gretchen. In her plaid gray skirt and white knee-socks and white blouse, with two small yellow barrettes in her hair, she looked really, really lovely.

“Hey,” I said, sitting up, kicking my feet off the hood.

“Hey,” Gretchen said, lighting up a cigarette. She offered me one and I waved it away.

“Hey, Brian,” Kim said, grabbing my arm. “How have you been? Wow, have you been working out?”

“Fuck off.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, squeezing my arm. “Look, look at these muscles.”

We all got in the Escort as Gretchen started it up. Kim and Gretchen put on their sunglasses, big black plastic jobs you get at like carnivals or something. I put my dress shirt over my head, blocking out the sun.

“Hey, Brian, Gretchen and I were talking and we were wondering if you’ve ever screwed a girl in the ass?”

“Fuck off.”

“But see, Gretchen and I have never been screwed in the ass and we were wondering if you would do it to us? One after the other or at the same time? Which one works for you?”

“
Brains for dinner, brains for lunch
,” I mumbled, which was also from one of my favorite Misfits songs, “Braineaters.”

“What? What does that even mean?” Kim asked, giggling, turning back to me.

“Well, you can go try and figure it out,” I said.

“Just leave him alone. If you keep talking about sex, he’s gonna get an erection back there,” Gretchen said, and it was as if I hadn’t gone anywhere the last couple of months, as if I had never stopped hanging out with them, and somehow almost everything was back to normal for me.

“So are you going to junior prom, Brian?” Kim asked.

“Yeah, I dunno. I didn’t ask anybody yet,” I said. “I mean, I’d like to go with someone I like know, you know? But it doesn’t look good right now.”

“Why the fuck do you wanna go?” Kim asked.

“You know, because it’s fucking normal. I feel like I missed out on like everything, you know, all that normal high school shit. It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime thing and all.”

“That’s bullshit,” Gretchen said. “All those kids, all those kids that go are assholes. They’re the kids who used to pick on you. And now you want to party with them and spend like hundreds of dollars to get dressed up and everything? It’s a fucking waste.”

“Fuck,” I said. “I just want to have a nice time. I just want to go for myself, you know. I think it would be a lot of fun.”

“Well, good luck,” she said, looking at me, rolling her eyes.

“Good luck to you,” I said back, nodding.

“What for?”

“Well, maybe Tony will take you.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

“No, like the two of you can go and he can be like Prom King. You can tell them he’s like your dad.”

At that moment, Gretchen pulled the car over in the middle of fucking 95th Street, cars honking and swerving as she threw the transmission into fucking park. “OK, that’s it. Get out.”

“What?” I said, laughing.

“You think you’re like some bad-ass now or something. You got all this attitude now so you think you can, like, talk mean to me?”

“No,” I said. “I was just joking around. You two fuck with me all the time.” Gretchen shook her head and then threw the car into gear and started driving again. In a moment, she turned back to me and frowned.

“I still wouldn’t go to prom,” she said. “Even if he was a junior. Even if he asked me.”

“OK,” I said, because I had heard her say it, though we both knew she was lying.

In a moment, we pulled up to the mall and Kim got out and Gretchen and me were driving around together again, just Gretchen and me, and she asked, “Do you want me to take you home?” and I said, “Not really, I can drive around for a while,” and she said, “Well, I’m meeting up with Tony,” and I said, “Well then, I guess take my ass home,” and we were heading over to my house and listening to the Ramones and I just wanted to blurt it all out and say,
You’re like my best friend in the whole evil universe and I want you to go with me, just go with me to this stupid fucking thing,
but I didn’t say a damn word. I didn’t say anything.

We pulled up in front of my crummy fucking house and I said, “Later,” and climbed out and watched her drive away, thinking how badly I wanted to ask her to go with me, knowing she’d laugh and say no, because it wouldn’t seem “cool” or because she was so in love with Tony Degan, and also knowing I could never ask her because of how much I actually liked her, and then she was pulling away and the Escort was just a funny dot and I thought,
Maybe things haven’t changed at all. Maybe nothing in the world’s changed for me.

four

We got these rubber Halloween masks and started wearing them all the time. It was Nick’s idea, mostly. We would put them on, the Wolfman and Frankenstein, and ride around on our skateboards, breaking into parked cars in the mall parking lot. In order to silently save the world, we’d remove the bad cassette tapes from ordinary people’s brainwashed lives.

Like I said, it was all Nick’s idea, mostly. It started out simple enough: He had asked, after school one day. Nick, the kid from the Dean’s office, was leaning against my locker, his dress shirt off and tied around his waist, an Independent black and red and white T-shirt on, black backpack slung over one shoulder, shiny white skateboard resting behind his head. “You ready or what?” he asked me.

“For what?”

“Let’s go tear shit up,” he said.

“Um, I didn’t bring my board,” I said, lying. He looked at me like I was slightly crazy, kind of tilting his head.

“You didn’t bring your board?”

“No, I forgot it,” I said. “You know how it is.”

“What kind of board did you say you had anyway?” he asked, squinting, kind of sizing me up again.

“I dunno,” I said, kind of dumb and embarrassed. “What kind do you have?”

“Dude, do you know how to skate or not?” he asked, staring at me like I was very fucking funny, his eyes wide and his mouth parted a little.

“Not really, I guess,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said, nodding and smiling. “It’s very fucking easy. Let me bring you a board tomorrow, OK?” and like that, he did.

On the skateboard there had once been an old school Tony Hawk drawing, in red and gold and black, this cool hawk skull screened on the deck’s bottom, but now it was almost completely covered in magic marker that read, “I love Jennifer Bradley” and “JENNY” and “I love JENNY,” which was the reason the deck had been out of commission, because apparently Nick was no longer in love with Jenny. The board did have brand-new trucks, wide Spitfire wheels—good for learning, Nick said—and grip tape that was cut in the blackish gray silhouette shape of a ghost.

“It’s easy. Just stay on the board and, like, don’t try anything funny,” he said, and we walked out into the parking lot, leaving our shit in our lockers. I put one foot on the board and started to push off and fell on my ass right away.

“I think I broke my ass,” I said.

Nick skated over and slid to a stop over me, shaking his head. “You better get used to that feeling quick,” he said. “Check this out.” He lifted his black field pants leg and showed me a huge red, white, and pink scar shaped like a strange insect covering his entire shin. “I got that shit two days after my first board.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It was the first time I got hit by a car,” he said, proudly.

“First time?”

He nodded and smiled, lifting both of his sleeves, then his shirt, pointing to all the different scars and bruises. “This is from a pickup truck. This is from a 1985 Corvette. This is from my mom’s minivan when she backed over my ass.”

“Shit,” I said. “Well, when was the last time a car hit you?”

“I ran into the back end of a Plymouth this morning.”

On the skateboard, I was total shit. I mean, after a couple of days I could stay on the board most of the time, but I could not go over cracks in the fucking sidewalk or major bumps without kicking through them, having to push forward over them with my right foot. I could not go down or up curbs. I could not stop without almost fucking wiping out. But I could stay on the fucking board itself for a long time, I guess. Nick tried for like four hours one day to teach me how to fucking ollie—you know, kick the nose of the board up just enough to clear a curb—but I couldn’t do it for the fucking life of me. I liked being on the board, I liked how I felt. I mean, I could get around from one point to another for the most part, I was just not very good at it. Which was OK, because it didn’t seem to bother Nick, I guess.

OK, very quick, Nick and I were like skating almost every day after school, all over the fucking south side where skating was not cool at all, from the bus stop to Chicago Ridge Mall, mostly. We’d skate around the enormous parking lot and I’d practice my ollies onto the lower curbs and I still couldn’t get enough fucking air to clear them and Nick would kind of skate around by himself, trying different tricks, rail slides, frontsides, shit I didn’t even know the names for. Sometimes other skater kids would show up and they would kind of show off, you know, for each other, rail-sliding off the lower bike racks and trying to fucking jump on the stone benches. Mostly, I just watched them.

What we really started doing was this: We’d skate up to the mall, cruise around for a while, wait until the parking lot started filling up, and then we’d skate very carefully in between the parked cars, looking for people who had left their car doors open, which, believe it or not, was like tons of people, and then we’d kind of like help ourselves to what was inside. It was mostly nickel-and-dime stuff: an engraved silver cigarette lighter that said
Stubby
, a nudie girl cardboard air-freshener that was hanging on a rearview mirror which Nick wore around his neck all afternoon, a dime bag of very, very seedy weed which we tried to smoke but which was like totally cashed. And then we hit the fucking jackpot of all time. In the backseat of some blue Chevy minivan, full of toys and games and kids’ jackets and shoes, there were all these rubber Halloween masks, one of the Wolfman and one of Frankenstein, and a few others like a monkey and a hobo which we didn’t bother to take. Because I had found the minivan unlocked, I got to pick first, so of course I took the fucking Wolfman. We put them on and began to skate around, laughing like fucking crazy.

It became our thing, then, you know, riding around in the Chicago Ridge Mall parking lot on skateboards wearing these stupid Halloween masks after school like every day; the Wolfman and Frankenstein darting between parked cars, scaring the fuck out of the shoppers, popping out from behind vans and trucks and making monster sounds. It was pretty fucking funny to us. The fat-ass security guards were not amused, however. They would watch us skate around for a while, them standing under the rainbow-color canopies smoking or mumbling into their walkie-talkies, then two or three of them would come charging at us from out of one of the entrances, a chubby blur of blue, and we’d laugh and howl at them, making spooky sounds, skating to the other side of the mall before they even had a chance to nab us. It made it more fun, I guess, having them chase after us. It gave us something to look forward to, maybe. Once, Nick and I were sitting on our skateboards, him trying to light a fart with a Malibu Beach lighter he had just stolen, and we were both laughing and not paying attention, and from around the front end of a parked white Mustang convertible, this security guard came hauling ass toward us, making a grab for Nick. He got ahold of his shirt, a white Ramones T with their American Eagle In-the-Ramones-We-Trust logo, and Nick just jerked the shirt off over his head and started skating off, the top part of him naked as he laughed and snorted, pulling down the rubber Frankenstein mask while we made our getaway. “I really liked that fucking shirt,” was all he ever said about the whole thing.

OK, Nick got together his own fucking agenda at the time, though. Going into people’s cars was not just minor theft for him. For him, it was very serious business because he was like on this important crusade. It went like this: We’d skate around, wearing our masks, trying the different car doors. When we found one that was unlocked, we’d check around, make sure there weren’t any fatty security guards standing by the mall’s entrance watching us as they smoked, no busybody suburban housewives glancing over arms of wrapped packages or curious, bug-eyed kids peeping at us, crying about the toy they didn’t get, then one of us would open the driver’s side door, because we figured that was less suspicious, and usually Nick would kind of peek around, checking in the ashtray, glove compartment, under the seat. If there was no loot, he’d begin looking through the cassette tapes—not to steal, but to fucking evaluate. So like most of the time these shoppers had like Crystal Gayle or Kenny Loggins or New Kids on the Block or George Michael and shit, and, well, Nick would take all the fucking tapes, I mean all of them, out of the car and fling them underneath the rows and rows of nearby station wagons and minivans. Expelled. Removed. Never to be heard from ever again. It was serious fucking business to him.

“Do you know the only shit they play on the radio is paid to be on there, so you don’t have a fucking choice about what you hear? It’s all these fucking businesses,” he’d say, and then whip a copy of the
Dirty Dancing
soundtrack underneath the wheels of whatever vehicle was closest. “Who the fuck wants to hear Patrick Swayze sing anyway? Poor corporate slaves,” he’d whisper, sad, shaking his head. “D.I.Y., right?”

“Right,” I’d say, having no idea what D.I.Y. meant.

“Our work here is done. These people will find a way to thank us someday.”

As you can guess, not much was spared. If once in a million years someone actually did have something decent—the Beatles or Buddy Holly or something—Nick would just end up taking it anyway. It gave us something to do, you know, something we thought was positive and worthwhile, even though it was minimally criminal. We seriously thought what we were doing would somehow save the world because it was so easy to understand that bad music actually made people bad. We were the lucky ones; we had it all figured out. We had somehow managed to avoid being brainwashed by reckless corporations and it was our right—our destiny—to help by eliminating every bad cassette in the mall parking lot, tape by tape, car by car, day after day.