Like We Care (6 page)

“Jesus,” he thought, the need to pee reaching critical stages. “With three-quarters of a beer in me, I might even be bold enough to chat a girl up if there was one here without a guy putting his hands all over her.”

If everybody in this line wasn’t in fact paired up, waiting to get into the. . .

Todd figured it out in the exact instant the door opened and Joel Kasten emerged, Dee Dee Weir trailing behind. Both were adjusting their clothes.

Joel looked flushed, slightly dazed, as he stumbled into Todd, next in line.

“Oh,” Joel said, surprised and then impressed to find Todd Noland here. “Hey. It’s all yours. . .”

Joel looked around, trying to see who Todd had scored as a sex mate. No one was there, as Todd—and the rest of the room—painfully realized.

“Better get out of his way, dude,” Barry Patton guffawed, a couple gallons of beer already in him. A large group—mostly juniors, and all smelling blood—crowed, “This kid needs the room to himself!”

Barry made the universal sign for jerking off as Todd went pale, realizing that his blunder had been a source of sniggering fun for the past several minutes.

Todd looked past Joel into what he had thought was the bathroom, and saw the knotted sheets upon the bed, the wadded tissues and rubber wrappers on the nightstand. On the wall above the bed, Todd noted, was an embroidered rendering of two teddy bears hugging, with big cartoon hearts over their heads.

“Hugs ’n’ kisses!” it said.

Todd looked to Joel, wondering if his old friend might save him.

“Jesus, dude,” Joel said. His minions, having laid bare the underbelly, breathlessly awaited the plunging of the knife. “Go jack off someplace else. The fuck’s the matter with you?”

Off Joel’s razor blade sneer, the boys in the rec room fell into hoots and snorts, singeing his skin. The embarrassed, emasculating giggles of the girls drove him toward the stairway leading up and out.

He sat on the curb for an hour and a half until his dad came to take him home.

F
rom the doctor’s office, it was a natural straight shot to the Happy Snack. Beyond Joel’s fierce desire for a cigarette, he knew that gathered in the store’s parking lot would be a fair sampling of his constituency, sucking their smokes, swigging their beers, striking their poses.

While Joel had never physically left them, his true essence had been denied them for going on three months. He longed to be among them again, their silenced king restored!

Only as Joel crawled from his car and noticed the scruffy knot of teenaged ennui that awaited him did it occur to him that he was about to make his triumphant Happy Snack return with Todd Noland at his side. It was an instinctive thing, this automatic style-gauge that hovered above his head and constantly cast back pictures of the precise attitude he was conveying in that moment, allowing him to make unconscious alterations—whether subtle or pronounced—which would make him conform perfectly to the image he sought to project. Cool people are born with these things.

The gauge had never failed him before, and now the alarms were going off: Todd Noland, a tolerable drone when he knew to stick to the corners, was about to be recast as someone vital to Joel’s recovery.

A line would be crossed. Todd would now be offered to the A-crowd as someone worthy of Joel’s company, and thus a new member of the team.

Joel did not anoint outsiders casually. Did Todd Noland—who never wore the right clothes, who played no sport, who leaked insecurity and awkwardness like a watery fart—truly have the Right Stuff?

“Fuck it,” Joel thought. He made the rules; he could break the rules. Maybe the finest privilege of mass acclaim was to do something unexpected, just to watch the others follow behind.

This would be his thank-you gift to Todd. For helping him.

“See ya,” Todd said, already half a block toward school as Joel came around the back of the car. Todd pulled on his invisible body armor as the school building—the repository of the Right Thing To Do, no matter how viciously it scraped the essence from the soul—pulled him closer.

“Hey,” Joel shouted through his tender but joyously revived jaw. “Where’re you going?” A storm was predicted for later in the day. The cooling air felt marvelous on his face.

Todd turned, walked backward as he spoke. The Right Thing To Do would not be denied.

“Got Trig. Gonna be late.”

Joel ran to catch up.

“No, come on. Hang with me for a while. I want you to.”

Todd scrunched up his face and looked to the Happy Snack parking lot, where a dense, sticky cloud of smoke and teen punk swagger clung to the air. Not only was that the Wrong Thing To Do, it was also kind of a joke.

“Nah.”

Todd obviously didn’t get it. “Come on,” Joel said, a little sternly. “You’re with me now.”

Todd looked again to the parking lot as Bobby Slopes hawked up a huge ball of snot and spat it onto the side of a Honda.

“So you skip a class,” Joel crooned. “I’ll fix it with Webber. I’ll tell him you were helping me. He won’t touch you. Besides, I don’t have any money. You gotta buy me some cigarettes.”

“I’m not buying cigarettes!” Todd squeaked, instantly ashamed for his timidness, but at the same time proud of his stance. He thought cigarettes were for assholes.

“Then I’ll just take your cash. Come on.”

It was so odd, yet not unfamiliar, to have Joel Kasten
begging
for Todd’s companionship. Back when they were eight—back when there was parity— they would switch off luring the other into adventures.

Todd looked back toward school.

“Go with him,” it whispered. “I’ll just swallow you whole tomorrow.”

Todd shrugged. Inside his head, where his thoughts were always allowed to pool and gather potency before being sent forth, he said: “What the fuck.”

(Unlike his peers, Todd didn’t swear that often, believing that the indiscriminate spraying of an expletive as glorious and wicked as “fuck” simply diluted its sting. Time was, not that long ago, when a “fuck” introduced into everyday conversation meant something, could even guarantee a response most definitely provoked. It was a word grenade, he thought, to be employed sparingly. When it mattered.)

And so he said: “Yeah. What the fuck.”

Joel smiled, his jaw—still being road-tested—smarting from the workout.

“Fucker!” Wad Wendell howled upon noting Joel’s arrival, high-fiving him heartily and throwing a forearm into his shoulder. Todd always noticed how dim people invariably greeted each other with strenuous over-exaggeration, as if to celebrate the fact that neither had been struck dead by their staggering stupidity since last they met.

Joel threw his head back and let out a wolfish “Whoooo!”

“Hey,” Wad continued. “Fucking Slopes has VD!”

“Shut the fuck up, I do not!” Bobby protested as the coterie of parking lot sluts stirred uncomfortably.

“His piss hurts!”

Joel was confused.
This
was the reception he was getting?

Slopes drew nearer, deep dread in his voice. “Dude, it burns when I piss, like razor blades. That don’t mean it’s VD, right? Could just be like a dick virus, right?”

“Hey!” Joel protested. “I’m just back from the doctor, you fucks. Anybody notice I’m talking for the first time in two fucking months?”

“Dude, you’re talking!” Wad smiled, winding up to pretend to sock Joel right in his still fragile jaw. “Now you can tell Slopes his dick is gonna fall off!”

Joel glowered. “Just shut the fuck up. Who’s got a cigarette?”

Wad didn’t. Wad never had any. Wad was a first-class mooch.

Slopes had just lit his last and thrown the empty pack to the ground, where garbage was already nearly ankle deep. On this precise spot, in the middle of the night, while these degenerate teens dreamed their foul, musky dreams, a broom-bearing Daljit Singh would be uttering dark curses at them all.

“Here,” Rod Broyals offered. It looked like a joint, but Joel knew it was a bidi, one of those dopey Indian imports that somehow had become fashionable. Joel deeply resented any fad that ignited without his endorsement. “It’s cinnamon,” Broyals boasted.

“Get that the fuck away from me,” Joel barked. “I haven’t had a smoke in two months, and my first is gonna be some gay foreign thing?”

He looked to his men, his top lieutenants. They had nothing for him.

“You guys are fucking useless. Come on,” he turned to Todd, who had been rendered invisible up to this point. As Todd followed Joel through the crowd toward the store, Wad and the others looked on with surprised sneers.

A foul mood was draping itself over Joel. There were the usual high-fives and dead-eyed offerings of genuflection, but nobody seemed to realize the significance of this day. It’s not like there was a memo released, alerting them to the trip to the doctor. But in the past, word just got around when something key happened to Joel Kasten.

Back in the second grade, Joel had seen a video of Eskimos honoring one of their own by standing in a circle, holding an animal skin taut, and trampolining their hero high into the air, his body flung heavenward by the love of his people.

He couldn’t quite envision how this would translate to his present reality, but Joel really kind of thought that by now he’d have been thrown into the air like an Eskimo.

“Give me one of those,” he growled upon seeing the first pack of Marlboros in the crowd. He didn’t even know the girl he took it from, just knew that if he didn’t get a smoke soon, this piss-poor morning was going to really bottom out.

He held the cigarette between his fingers, and felt the raw smoothness of its paper. Its time had come. Its skin would now be set ablaze, its fertile contents glowing gloriously as it transmogrified from scratchy tobacco to smooth, smooth smoke, set free to caress the hungry passageways of Joel Kasten’s respiratory system.

From the centuries-old tobacco fields of America’s proud South to this diagonally-striped parking lot in a strip mall, a holy communion would now commence.

Joel engaged the flint of his child-proof disposable lighter, and touched the flame to the tip of the Marlboro, welcoming the smoke into his lungs.

And coughed. Not dramatically—no hacking or gagging. But still: not cool.

“Shit!” he barked, throwing the cigarette to the ground. “How the fuck old are these?!” His jaw raged as he ground his teeth.

Darlene Foster, from whom Joel had swiped the cigarette, panicked. She had never once been addressed by Joel Kasten, not in the thirteen years they had gone to the same schools.

She was an ugly girl. She had no business being here.

“I just. . .”

“Christ!” Joel sneered, pushing his way toward the store.

Todd followed behind, turning to give a sympathetic nod to Darlene as he passed. He understood.

T
he swelling would go down; she’d stop in a minute to get some ice for it. Annie McCullough wished she hadn’t yelled at them so viciously but, dammit! she had to get this work done.

She could hear them rustling shyly outside the door, too afraid to knock, but desperately curious to know what she was doing in there.

What she did, not just in her old bedroom but with her career, her
life
, baffled them. They knew she lived in Manhattan. They knew she worked for that company that shows the rock and roll videos. And they knew she had become so very brittle, harsh, and gaunt since leaving home. By all accounts she was flourishing, at whatever it was she did.

And, lord, how she smoked. It had been the big issue, after her mother had convinced her to come home for a full week to celebrate her father’s fiftieth birthday. Did she have to smoke in the house?

It was the worst possible time for Annie who, as VP of Special Projects at R
²
Rev, had quickly learned that her sole special project was finding a way out of this joke of a position that Hutch Posner had stuck her with.

Over the course of a couple years, the network had taken off, just as Hutch had promised, its scabrous blend of well-faked societal contempt and lowbrow irreverence sparking a chemical charge in the lustily-sought-after teen male demo. The cross promotions with World Wrestling Entertainment, the hiring of porn princess Mimi SoWett as veejay for the vital ten p.m. to two a.m. daypart, special programming like
Bowel Cloud Theatre
(Roger Viner’s smash idea to air things like the State of the Union Address mixed with fart noises)—they all spoke to the very special entertainment needs of the average American male teenager. The fact that post-adolescent tastemakers and trend-definers on both coasts were also tuning in and getting their rocks off was just a validation that R
²
Rev worked.

And watching it all from the sidelines was Annie McCullough, who simmered and stewed every time she saw the R
²
Rev logo cast in gold and dangling from a rapper’s neck, or tattooed over the scabby sores on a thrash metaller’s biceps, or driving a marked-up goldmine at every mall boutique in the country.

Having done no less than name the goddamned enterprise, Annie had then fallen back on her Midwestern naiveté, foolishly assuming that the R
²
Rev tidal wave would sweep her along and deposit her in a position that rightfully acknowledged her role in the network’s success. Only after weeks stretched into months, only after she began to realize that the skin-searing misogyny that would come to fuel R
²
Rev’s programming also defined the well-sculpted go-go boys who were driving it, did Annie realize she had been screwed.