Like We Care (29 page)

And that was it. The show was running long, and the cameras never went outside again. Seeing the broadcast for the first time on the tape that Todd had recorded for him, Joel was embarrassed at how fleeting and pointless it turned out to be.

“Who was
that?
” Todd asked.

Joel fumed at the memory. “So they come out the second time,” he recalled, “and they say that this time Manny Clarke is going to interview the leader of the protest. Then, all of a sudden, this preppy shit, tripping on ecstasy, is brought from inside the theatre. He’s led to the middle of the crowd, and
he
gets put on camera! Annie told me later that his name was
Dylan Viceroy
,” he said, mocking the pretentiousness of the name, “the kid of some R
²
Rev big shit. She was pissed!”

Todd could only smile bitterly. “Perfect. Just perfect.”

“And that was it. They told us we were done. They wouldn’t let me back into the theatre, so I couldn’t find Annie. I ended up standing on the sidewalk for over an hour in the middle of fucking New York City until she finally came to get me.”

Todd could tell that this had scared him.

“She took me over to the hotel, we hung out for a while, and I was in a cab to the airport by nine this morning.”

“What was the hotel like?”

Joel perked up. “Dude, you won’t believe it.”

He produced a videotape and stuck it into the VCR. On the screen was Joel’s shaky tour of his room at Le Parker Meridien, a low-end suite for the worldly traveler, but a palace to a kid who had known only Holiday Inns. The camera lingered over the marbled bathroom with its Jacuzzi tub, its gold-plated faucets, and the two-line telephone right beside the toilet. Then it ambled into the main room.

And there was Annie.

She looked exhausted. Her hair was mussed, her shoes off, and she was dragging on a cigarette. She seemed a little drunk.

“Hi, Todd!” she waved brightly, sincerely, into the lens. “I miss you! I know it stinks that you’re not here, but next time. . . I promise!”

Todd squirmed a little.

The tape proceeded to give a dizzying display of the room’s many wonders, but Todd saw only this: the bed was a tangle of sheets, the clock read 2:49, and Annie—every time Joel swung the camera back at her— seemed embarrassed, a little shy.

For just a flash, the camera caught Joel in a mirror. He was wearing only a towel, and the hotel’s free shower cap. Like a wise-ass.

“New York City, bay-bee!” he bellowed on the tape.

Todd shut down and iced over. Joel went to New York
and
he got laid, by Annie. No matter how clever he was or how strong his potential might be once he left high school and merged into adulthood, Todd was reminded for the zillionth time that it was always going to be the Joel Kastens of the world who won. And this time, Todd had set everything up so that Joel could get the goodies.

What kind of dick does that?
Todd asked himself.

Maybe someday he’d be old enough to withstand a jab this lacerating, but right now he just wanted to be alone to die a little.

Joel, never long on perceptiveness, rambled on. He shut down the tape and hit rewind as he turned to Todd with a devilish grin.

“Hey, what did you think of ScroatM?”

Todd shrugged listlessly. He really wanted Joel to go.

When the ScroatM part of the tape reached the playback head, Joel giggled.

“Check this out.”

He played the clandestine footage of ScroatM taking a faceful of dingleberries. It was brilliantly funny—the preening, cocksure superstar literally getting blown off his feet by the blast, and then shrieking like an asshole while being pummeled by his own staff and dragged offstage.

Todd couldn’t suppress a grin. But it wasn’t the reaction Joel expected.

“Great,” Todd smiled sadly.

Joel had come to know Todd’s wiring pretty well the past few months. Something was really wrong.

“Hey. What’s—”

Todd was still watching the tape. The onstage fracas abruptly cut to a plate of bagels, then an image of someone slumped over in a chair in a sparsely lit room, and Joel stepping into view.

Seeing this on the TV, Joel leapt up and turned off the tape, like a kid caught by his parents with pornography.

Now Todd was intrigued. “What’s that?”

Joel pulled the tape from the VCR. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Lemme see.”

“No, all right? Just no.” Joel’s mood turned dark.

Todd stood angrily. “Fine. Then, you know what? Just get the hell outta here. I really enjoyed your vacation video, and hearing about all the fun you had, but—” As he turned, the laminated pass that Joel had ceremoniously draped around his neck fluttered annoyingly. Todd yanked it off.

“And. . . what is this? Why would I
want
this??”

He threw it at Joel and glared at him, just the faintest trace of tears in his eyes. Joel had given the pass to Todd, sincerely hoping he would like it.

“Hey. . .” Joel spoke softly.

“Look, we’re done, all right? The Happy Snack thing is gonna die off. Whatever happens with Mr. Kolak is pretty much up to Dean Stoller and his crowd. It’d be nice if
you
voted for him since you got him into this, but. . . do whatever the fuck you want.”

Joel hadn’t known much rejection in his life. As Todd stared at him hatefully and waited for him to leave, he tried to make sense of it.

“Dude,” he pleaded with a timid smile. “Come on.”

“I mean, we’re gonna graduate before we know it. It’s time to stop dicking around with this bullshit.
I’ve
got work to do. You, you’re gonna get your scholarship. You’re gonna play college ball, maybe get signed to the minors.

“The way things always seem to work out for you, you’ll probably go to the Yankees. Then you and Annie—”

The reflexive hitch in his voice nearly triggered the waterworks. Todd fought them off and turned away, but even Joel was bright enough to see what was going on here. For all his newfound admiration for the kid, he had forgotten how much Todd continued to do without.

He didn’t want him to hurt anymore.

“Dude. It was nothing.”

That stung the worst, because it was most likely true. That you could get it so often, with such ease—that you could blow it off as “nothing”— splashed upon Todd like acid.

He kept his back to Joel, because the tears that he refused to let loose were turning his nose red and runny. He refused to sniff like a girl.

“Just go, okay? I’ll see you at school.”

Joel gave up sadly. He grabbed his videotape and studied it hard. He made a decision.

“It’s just that, something happened. And it’s not like. . .” He stopped, then laid the tape on the coffee table before Todd. “Just don’t show it to anybody. Okay?”

Todd looked at the cassette curiously, rattled by Joel’s solemnity. He wanted to cast off this funk, go back to being friends and co-conspirators—just kids for maybe a little while longer—but something complicated had come between them. He nodded silently and watched Joel leave.

He didn’t want to see what was on the tape anymore, but now he figured he had to since Joel had trusted him when he didn’t have to.

He fed the tape into the machine, sat down, and watched queasily as ScroatM tore Joel to pieces. It was most painful to watch because it was so clear that going into the encounter, Joel felt he could hold his own with the rapper. Scroat was a superstar, but so was Joel in his own little world. Here they both were, backstage at the
VideoYears
. They could hang.

Joel had laid himself bare, and ScroatM ground him into the floor. For the first time ever, Joel looked small in Todd’s eyes. As Joel stood there dumbly and took the abuse, until he finally had to turn and run, Todd realized that Joel was experiencing what boys like Todd dealt with seemingly every day. The attack was extreme in Joel’s case, but he lived a life accustomed to extremes—most of them favorable. For boys like Todd, the hurts were more benign, more insidious. And they accumulated, knife nick by knife nick.

A dispirited Joel had apparently stopped taping until he got to the hotel room hours later, because as the VCR kept playing, Todd was all of a sudden back at Le Parker Meridien, with Joel and Annie and their tangled sheets.

He lunged at the remote and drove the images back into the plastic cassette, as if they were toxic and never again to be released.

He thought of Joel and the emotional highs and pressure drops the kid must’ve experienced just the day before, on his own and so far from home. If he hadn’t just left, they could’ve talked about it. There was still something that had been altered between them, something that most likely wouldn’t be right anymore. But Todd would’ve talked to him about it.

Then he thought of ScroatM, the contempt making his stomach churn.

Lube up, Gomer.

“Fucker,” Todd muttered as he held the videotape. “The little fucker.”

“N
o, Ma. Don’t come.”

Frank was on the phone to his mother down South. She had been listening—first with apprehension, then with pride—as her son detailed to her the progress of his campaign. It was all still impossible for her to comprehend: her only child, always so reticent and frail, was, out of the blue, running for office up there in Illinois. And despite his protestations, she could decipher, through his efforts to downplay it all, that it was looking like he could win.

“It’s not a big deal. It’s a three-thousand-dollar-a-year Council seat. I’d be making sure that snow got plowed and garbage got picked up. And besides,” he said, out loud this time but constantly inside his head, “you never know how these votes are gonna come out. You could come all this way for nothing.”

There was one of those dramatic Mom pauses, then softly: “Your father would be so proud of you.”

“
Ma. . .
”

But then again:
Sure, maybe
. Why wouldn’t his old man have been proud of him? At 44, Frank was now older than his father had been when he died. And he was stepping outside himself for the very first time, taking that fragile self-confidence that had always lay useless and unexplored way down deep and asserting it in a way he could never have dreamed possible.

He was taking a stand in his community. His father would have respected that.

True, he had to keep reminding himself, none of this began with him. He understood early on that he was mostly a prop being used by the town’s young people to challenge and mock their elders. He understood that his race was being put out there to provoke the docile, non-specific prejudice that ran through even the most genial neighbor.

But he saw this too: these kids (and they were “kids,” these former students of his) respected him, and seemed genuinely grateful to have reason to be around him again. In many, he had planted the seed of political activism just now blossoming with this campaign. Who better to endorse than the man who told them, way back when they were young and stupid and so far removed from caring, that one day it would be up to them to see how the world was run?

He made the choice to actually turn his candidacy into a real thing, and to have it matter. He did know the inner workings of this town. He did know intimately the histories of past societies and the way that they grew and perished at the hands of public policy. Why
not
him?

All of a sudden, he had his very own website, with his opinions on civic matters on display for everyone to see. Even more exciting were links to similar campaigns that had popped up all over the country, each having grown out of Todd and Joel’s slyly potent stab at the corporate boning their generation was constantly enduring. It was a genuine grassroots movement, facilitated by state-of-the-art media.

It was breathtaking, it really was, the way in which the technology and the message meshed to put the word out. Todd, via Joel, had articulated what teenagers kind of knew was being done to them, and the internet—where the young communed largely amongst themselves, most adults forever too dim to fully understand the web—shotgunned it cleanly:

Withhold your coin. Cast your vote. Piss somebody off. Fuck with the wiring.
Matter.

Might be a laugh.

The Happy Snack website continued to flourish, Ira Zimbaugh’s technical wizardry drawing hundreds of hits a day and rewarding each repeat visitor with more diversions, more games, more of the hottest bootleg audio and video files buried deep inside the page. You had to fully explore the site, follow every banner and link, to get to the treasures Ira had hidden there. And while you’re there, check out the Happy Snack parking lot
live
, where throngs remained posted—even when the snows came—to badger the little brown man who was no longer Daljit Singh. Singh had vanished one night, reportedly taking his family back to India.

It happened every afternoon around three p.m. local time, the new and instantly besieged Happy Snack proprietor emerging from the shop like a figure in a cuckoo clock to be assaulted by pennies as he emptied the trash. You could dial it up from anywhere in the world and watch the fun.