Like We Care (13 page)

Todd prepared to provoke. “So, how ’bout it? Just say you
don’t
go buy cigarettes?”

“You’re such a fag!”

“Whatever.” Todd feigned hurt feelings. He looked away until Joel bit.

“Dude!” Joel exploded, laughing at the fact that his newly anointed sidekick was so freely busting his balls. “I haven’t had a decent cigarette in six weeks! You don’t know! You don’t smoke! You don’t just all of a sudden not smoke!”

“You did, for six weeks.”

“I had no choice!”

Todd shook his head. “Dunno. All of a sudden, there you were not smoking. You lived.”

“Yeah, and I fucking hated it.”

“So what happened this morning? You finally get your mouth working again, you finally get a smoke all fired up, and you’re coughin’ and gaggin’ like a girl or something.”

“That cigarette was wack! It tasted like shit!”

“They all taste like shit. Just after six weeks, you forgot.”

Joel watched the road. This new alliance with Todd was going to be a problem if he kept knowing stuff.

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Todd mimicked. “‘Hey, here’s a plan: I’m gonna set some weeds on fire and suck the smoke into my lungs, because that’s just
got
to be tasty.
And
I’m gonna pay a ton of money to do it, and I’ll stink afterwards, and it maybe might kill me.’” Todd shook his head. “Geniuses.”

Joel hit the brakes hard at the curb. The Happy Snack lay just ahead.

“You know what? Get the fuck outta here. Go lay this gay shit on the Boy Scouts. I can’t be seen with this.”

“Look at them!” Todd jabbed toward the parking lot, where America’s future had re-congealed in the aftermath of the storm. Wad Wendell had found a Baby Ruth wrapper with melted chocolate all over it. He was pretending to wipe his ass. “What is
that?”

“We hang out. It pisses people off,” Joel said. “What’s the problem?”

“You’re not pissing off Jimmy the Swami. Everything you smoke, everything you eat, everything you drink—that’s money in that dick’s pocket! He’s in there giving us grief, jerking us around, and meanwhile he’s just loving the fact that we keep coming back for more.”

“Maybe.”

“What ‘maybe’?! He makes a living because we can’t stop buying his shit. You don’t even really
want
a cigarette, but he’s in there right now, just waiting for you: ‘He’ll be back. He’s got money for me, that little shit. He’ll be back. All his friends will be back. Before long, I can afford to buy
three
camels!’”

Joel stifled a laugh. “You’re crazy.”

“And his bosses, Happy Snack Incorporated? And the rich, white, country club assholes that make the cigarettes and the Doritos and the Mountain fucking Dew? Millionaires, every damned one of ’em. From picking our pockets. If we grew a brain, they’d all be eating outta dumpsters.”

Joel looked at Todd, guardedly awed. Todd was swaggering, armed with nothing but words.

Something floating here felt best shot down. “Yeah, right.”

“Don’t think so? Wanna mess Jimmy up? Just stop coming here, all of us. You couldn’t hurt him more if you burned the place to the ground. And it’s legal.”

Joel watched the sun flare off the store’s endlessly opening front door. No one walked out empty-handed.

“Huh. . .” Joel said thoughtfully. Todd saw something take hold.

“A pack of cigarettes is over four bucks a pop. How much money did you save, not buying cigarettes the past six weeks?”

“I don’t know. Seventy, eighty bucks.”

“Jesus!” Todd marveled. “And no munchies, no Cokes. Right?”

Joel tried to calculate. “Yeah. That’s probably another forty right there. Christ. . .”

“Think Jimmy didn’t miss you?”

Joel glowered. “Fucker sure didn’t show it this morning.”

“Sure he did. He had your smokes right there ready for you, he was so happy to see you. He was your buddy, ready to give you what you wanted. You sure as hell had what
he
wanted.”

Joel’s car continued to rumble at the curb. Todd knew how much it cost to keep this wreck on the road, knew that Joel’s various athletic commitments kept him from holding down a part-time job.

“So, just don’t give him your money, at least not today,” Todd said. “See how you feel tomorrow.”

Joel felt Todd trying to empower him. He squirmed with both anticipation and unease as Todd sought to expand his understanding of how he moved through the world.

And yet. . .

“Dude, I really need a cigarette!” Joel laughed. “You don’t understand how hard it is to stop!”

“You
have
stopped. Just don’t start again.”

Joel grimaced and rubbed his jaw. He looked longingly at the smokers in the parking lot.

“Dude,” Todd bore down. “You took a fastball in the face. You coulda died. And
now
you’re gonna act like a pussy?”

Joel stared at Todd. He could kick Todd’s ass for such a taunt, or worse still, simply throw him from the car and from his inner circle back into the colorless nothing in which he previously wallowed.

What must be at stake here, for Todd to risk smashing this new camaraderie he had allowed to take root?

Joel threw his car into gear with a wet, metallic thunk, his wheels spinning free of the rain-washed asphalt as he sped away from the Happy Snack.

He eyed Todd quizzically as he shook his head. “Too numerous.”

“T
hat’s fucked up.” Bobby Slopes smiled uneasily.

There were sixteen of them there: Joel’s key disciples and five or six others who had earned the right to hang because they were on the team. Practice had just finished, and a chilled, mid-fall dusk was beginning to tether itself to the football field for the night. The strapping, preening starters—all juniors and seniors—draped themselves on and around the rusted out blocking sled.

Todd hung around the perimeter, pretending to round up gear.

Slopes still had his arm outstretched, an open pack of Marlboros in his hand. He let it fall limply.

“Just don’t want one,” Joel growled. “What’s the big fucking deal?”

Wad crowed oafishly. “You got busted! Marty and Lucille caught you lightin’ up and now you’re eatin’ shit!”

“Nobody busted me,” Joel sneered, eyeing Wad’s cigarette hungrily. “I’m just not using anymore. It’s fucking up my game. And I’m tired of wasting my money on this shit.”

Slopes was back with his Marlboros. For some reason, he thought it was important for him to close this transaction. “I’m
giving
you a smoke. Won’t cost you nothing.”

Joel looked to Todd hopefully. Todd shrugged: Do what you gotta do.

Joel held strong. “Yeah, so then you’ll come up short, and that’ll send you back to the Happy Snack even sooner. You have any idea how much money we spend there?”

“The fuck do I care?” Jeff Regan stretched languorously. “I’m workin’ twenty hours a week. My parents are paying me a hundred bucks a month just to keep a C average. I got money comin’ outta my ass.”

“Yeah,” Slopes concurred. “We gotta spend it somewhere.”

Joel looked to his team. Less than half the players smoked, but all were nestled among liter bottles of soda, shredded bags of chips, and an array of candy bars. In their lockers hung Abercrombie, J. Crew, and Gap wear, and Nikes lay unlaced, ready to accept their feet. In almost every pocket was a cell phone, should they need to check in on the pointlessness going on in a friend’s life.

They stank from consumption.

“You don’t
gotta
spend it anywhere! Jesus Christ, look at this.” Joel reached into his athletic bag and pulled out nearly two hundred bucks in cash, mostly fives and tens. At the end of all this, this might’ve been Todd’s shrewdest move, steering Joel to an ATM to make a withdrawal.

The football team sat up and took notice.

“Jesus,” Slopes ogled. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

“This is what I didn’t spend at the Happy Snack while my mouth was fucked up.” Joel fanned it out. “This is
my
money now. Mine, not that fucking towelhead’s.”

Wad simmered. “That dude’s fucked up. Christ, you go into that store and he treats you like a fuckin’ criminal.”

“Fuck yeah,” Jeff said. “Somebody oughta mess him up.”

Joel felt something click into place. He looked into the darkness for Todd, who remained outside the circle. The onset of night prevented their eyes from meeting. Joel pressed on, trying to fuse his effortless charisma with the rant that Todd had laid on him the day before.

What Todd had said, it stuck.

“So stop giving him your money! Fuck him if he’s not going to show us respect!”

The team fell silent. They had been blindly following Joel Kasten since they were children. All of a sudden, he seemed to be asking something of them.

Wad Wendell spoke doubtfully. “Dude, I gotta smoke.”

“You gotta smoke because you’re addicted. You’re addicted because rich old fucks somewhere, who are even bigger assholes than your old man, made sure you got addicted. They knew you’d light up the first time because that’s what fuckin’ kids do when they’re trying to be bad-asses, and they built something into the cigarette to make sure you kept coming back. You’re a
kid
, and they did this to you.

“These things will fucking
kill
you, for all they care. They just need your cash. They’re living fat-ass large offa you!”

Slopes considered his smoke, and took another drag.

Joel bent over and grabbed a fistful of cigarette and junk food wrappers. He tossed them into the air and watched them float to earth.

“This is all money we don’t have anymore. This is all cash we paid into the machine. Every dime we spend,
they
win.”

Ted Starkey, a cigarette virgin, washed down a Ding Dong with a swig of day-glo purple sports drink.

“Gotta eat, bro,” he belched. “Kinda key to my not dyin’.”

Joel’s rant was waning, and this crowd seemed hard-wired to get chumped—which was just what the market required of them.

“Yeah, well,” he slumped back onto the blocking sled. “You don’t gotta eat what they expect you to eat. I mean, fuck, we’re teenagers. We’re supposed to tell ’em to fuck off when they’re trying to get us to do something, and what they mostly want us to do is buy stuff.

“We’re making it too easy for them, that’s all.”

The night absorbed whatever contemplation was to occur here. Wad looked at Joel with a wry grin, trying to find the joke in all this.

“You are just too numerous, baby,” he chuckled.

The smokers smoked; the scarfers scarfed. Todd found his way to Joel, unsettled but proud to see his influence impressed upon the biggest fucking deal in the senior class.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Joel drawled. “Too numerous, stretched long.”

Christ
, he wanted a cigarette.

“P
le-e-e-e-e-z!
I have diarrhea!”

Casey kept pounding on the front door of the bank, dancing from foot to foot and contorting his face in anguish. John, Kenny, and Carlos huddled behind the two-way mirror on the side of the van. They were in Frankfort, Indiana. They were doing their jobs.

This had become a staple of the Casey show, when no one could be bothered to come up with something new. They’d pull up in front of a bank or some other impregnable institution in some Middle American town, push Casey out with instructions to pretend like he was about to make a dump in his pants, and see if anyone could be persuaded to open their doors for him off-hours.

Carlos yawned behind the camera. John skimmed through
Variety
while Kenny tried to catch up on his sleep. They had done this often enough to know that no one was going to let Casey in. The humor came from the screamed encounters through the glass. Early on, Kenny thought it’d be cool to rig up some radio-controlled colostomy bag type thing that could blow inside Casey’s pants for additional effect, but so far no one in New York would sign off on it.

Annie was a block away on a bench in the middle of the town square, squeezing her cell phone until she thought it would break.

“Are you sure he’s been receiving my messages?”

Hutch hadn’t gotten back to her for over a week, since the day she had attempted to share with him her vision of what she could bring to the network. During this freeze-out, she had convinced herself that she was on to something.

Almost as an accidental sideline, Annie had found herself meeting real teenagers as she forced Casey upon America. The stringers who provided her with so many of her story ideas were all high school students, all brighter-than-average kids, most of them toiling away at their school paper. All of a sudden, here was this girl, sounding not much older than themselves, calling from R
²
Rev in New York City, talking to them almost as colleagues as she asked them to keep an ear to the ground and relay to her any community events at which Casey Lattimer’s presence might instigate some fun.

These kids all sounded like Annie did only a few years earlier. When they pressed her for exciting details about life working for America’s hottest cable network, she felt honor-bound to make it all sound as scintillating as possible. She remembered how easily fantasies died when she was young, and she couldn’t bear to nick any arteries of hope with the truth.

Touching down in cities like Milwaukee, Tulsa, Fort Wayne and Flint, Annie never failed to find herself surrounded with fresh-faced teenagers desperate to make her brief stay as fruitful as possible. They were often pale and spotty and lump-like, almost never as dynamic or beautiful as the teen-ish models in the ads that paid Annie’s salary, but their simple desire to help and be appreciated was what made Annie’s job doable at all. The fact that they tended to treat her as a celebrity in her own right also never failed to boost her ego.

Everywhere she went, Annie could see the infection spread by R
²
Rev, but it was chiefly around the edges: the slackers in the high school parking lot, the gangstas lurking in the malls, the cap-backward skate punks dodging cars near the McDonald’s drive-thru. It was alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, these hopelessly malleable children—literally farm kids, some of them—costumed and contaminated by the dank, cynical caricatures that had been provided a rocket sled into teen consciousness by Hutch Posner’s basic cable snot party.