Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium (4 page)

‘Oh. Why not?’

‘It doesn’t make any difference, you and Dad finding out. I wasn’t doing it because I could get away with it, you know.’

‘So how long do you want to do it for?’

‘I dunno. ’Til I’m on my feet, I suppose.’

‘Make me a promise.’

I didn’t know until I said it what I wanted from him, but when I came out with it, it sounded right.

‘Stop when something worse happens.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know. When, I don’t know…When your Gran dies. Or when your dad and I get divorced or something. Stop then.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘I don’t know. It just felt right.’

‘But shouldn’t it be the other way round? I mean…When something bad happens, you won’t notice this.’

‘No. But I’ll know it’s there, that’s the thing. I don’t want to know it’s there when I don’t feel the same as I do now.’

‘How do you feel now?’

‘I feel OK. That’s the thing.’

He shrugged. ‘All right, then. I promise. Unless you know for a fact you’re getting divorced in the next week or so.’

‘No, we’re all right for the time being.’

He reached out his hand and we shook. ‘Deal,’ he said, and we left it at that.

That night, the three of us went out to the Crown for a drink before our dinner. We used to do it quite a lot when Mark was in his late teens, and it was a novelty for us all, but then Mark found better things to do, and we stopped. It wasn’t like this huge thing, all deciding that we should spend quality time together in order to get to know each other better; it just happened. Dave said he fancied going out for a drink, and Mark and I were in the same sort of mood. But I was glad that somehow the film had moved us back in time, rather than forward–that we’d somehow ended up doing something we used to do. It needn’t have been that way.

Anyway, I had this strange moment. Admittedly I’d been drinking lager on an empty stomach, but when Dave was getting the drinks in, and Mark was playing on the fruit machine, it was as if I floated out of myself and saw the three of us, all in our different places, all apparently cheerful, and I thought, I’d have settled for this on just about any day of my life since Nicky died. I wouldn’t have settled for it before I got married, but you don’t know, then, do you? You don’t know how scared you’ll feel, how many compromises you’re prepared to make; you don’t know that just about anything which looks OK on the outside can be made to feel OK on the inside. You don’t know it has to work that way round.

Mom always sings this crappy old song when I’m in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I’m in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I’m in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white movie face–eyes wide, all her teeth showing–she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often.) This song is called ‘Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive’, and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we’re going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won’t give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, today I’m going to do what the song says. I’m going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium is liable to walk upon the scene.

OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That’s the upside of it. I know that’s probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it’s definitely the major event of the week so far. It won’t be the major event of the year, I know that–Jesus, do I know that–but it’s still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I’m no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I’d set for myself was sixteen, which means I’m a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two years, in fact, because I’ll still be sixteen in twenty-two months’ time. So let’s say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid–a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I’d have to tell you a Stephen King-type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t help me right now.

So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don’t, and not just because I haven’t got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It’s not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren’t going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don’t want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I’d have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I’m a typical product of our times, or what I tell you about being fifteen, or any of those other questions we have to discuss when we read a story in school. It’s not the point. All you need to know is where I got the video recorder from, and maybe, I suppose, why I got it, so I’ll tell you.

I found it a couple blocks from my house, in this store that sells used electronic stuff. It cost fifty bucks, which seemed pretty good to me, although now it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, but that’s another story. Or rather, it’s this story, but a different part of it. And I bought it because…OK, so maybe I will have to give you a little background, but I won’t make it into a big drama. I’ll just give you the facts. My mom and I moved from L.A. to Berkeley about three months ago. We moved because Mom finally walked out on my asshole of a father, who writes movies for a living–although as none of them ever got made, it would be more accurate to say that he writes scripts for a living. Mom is an art teacher, and she paints her own stuff, too, and she says there are millions of people in Berkeley with an artistic bend or whatever, so she thought we’d feel right at home here. (I like it that she says ‘we’. I haven’t got an artistic bone in my whole body, and she knows that, but for some reason she thinks I take after her. It was pretty much always me and her against him, so that became me and her against L.A., and because I was against L.A., that somehow made me able to paint. I don’t mind. Painting’s pretty cool, some of it.)

Berkeley’s nice, I guess, but I didn’t have any friends here, so Mom made me join this dumb jazz orchestra thing. I’d just started to take trumpet lessons in L.A., and I didn’t suck too bad; a couple months after we moved, she saw an ad in a local bookstore for something called the Little Berkeley Big Band, which is like for people under the age of seventeen, and she signed me up. She had to sing the Ac-cent-chu-ate song a lot in the car the first evening I went to a rehearsal, because I’d be the first to admit that I wasn’t feeling very positive. But it was OK, not that I’d ever admit that to her. You can make a pretty fucking great noise when you’re part of a horn section. I can’t say I’m going to make any friends, though. The kind of people who want to play in the Little Berkeley Big Band…well, let’s just say that they’re not my kind of people. Apart from Martha, but I’ll tell you about her later. (And now you’ll probably have guessed some of the ending, but I don’t care, because you only know her name, and not how we ended up having sex. How we ended up having sex is the interesting part.) All you need to know about Martha: a) She’s hot; b) but hot in a not-slutty way. In other words, if you saw her, you would never guess in a million years that I’d persuade her to sleep with me. (Hopefully that has made you very curious–‘Man, how the fuck did he get to sleep with her?’–which means you’ll be more interested in the happy ending, rather than the weird middle, which means I don’t have to take the Stephen King route.)

But my argument for the video recorder was this: not only was I not making friends at the band rehearsals, but the rehearsals were actually
stopping
me from making friends. Here’s how that works: I go to rehearsals. We don’t have a VCR. (We left ours in L.A. with Dad, and for some insane reason Mom didn’t want to buy a replacement right away, I guess because we were supposed to read books and paint and play trumpets every night, like we were living in the Little House on the Prairie or something.) I can’t tape the NBA playoffs. I can’t talk about the games next day. Everyone thinks I’m a dweeb. Obvious, right? Not to her. I had to threaten to go back and live with Dad before she gave in, and even then she more or less told me I had to find the cheapest, crappiest machine in the Bay Area.

Anyway, it’s pretty great, this place. It sells old TVs–like really old, Back-to-the-Future old–and guitars, and amps, and stereos and radios. And VCRs. I just asked the old hippy guy who runs the place for the cheapest one he had that actually worked, and he pointed me over to this pile right in the corner of the store.

‘That one on the top works,’ he said. ‘Or at least, it was working a few days ago. Used to be mine.’

‘So why aren’t you using it anymore?’ I asked him. I was trying to be sharp, but that doesn’t often work for me. Give me an hour or two and I’m sharp as a box cutter, but sometimes in the moment, things don’t work out as good as I’d want.

‘I got a better one,’ he said. I couldn’t really argue with that. He could probably have made one that was better. Shit, I could probably have made one that was better.

‘But it records?’

He just looked at me.

‘Records and plays?’

‘No, kid. It does everything else, just doesn’t record or play.’

‘So if it doesn’t record or play, what’s the point…’ Then I realized he was being sarcastic, so of course I felt pretty dumb.

‘And you never had any trouble with it?’

‘Depends what you mean by trouble.’

‘Like…with recording? Or playing?’ I couldn’t think of another way of putting it.

‘No.’

‘So what sort of trouble did you have?’

‘If this conversation lasts any longer, I’ll have to put the price up. Otherwise it’s not worth my time.’

‘Does it come with a remote?’

‘I can find you one.’

So I just dug in my pocket for the fifty bucks, handed it to him, and went and got the thing off the top of the pile. He found a remote and put it in my jacket pocket. And then, as I was walking out, he said this weird thing.

‘Just…forget it.’

‘What?’

‘I did.’

‘What?’

This guy was old-school Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Grey beard, grey pony-tail, dirty old vest.

‘Cos it can’t know anything, right? It’s just a fucking VCR. What can it know? Nothing.’

‘No, man,’ I said. Because I thought I had a handle on him then, you know? He was nuts, plain and simple. Weed had destroyed his mind. ‘No, it can’t know anything. Like you say, what could it know?’

He smiled then, like he was really relieved, and it was only when he smiled that I could tell how sad he looked before.

‘I really needed to hear that,’ he said.

‘Happy to oblige.’

‘I’m forty-nine years old, and I got a lot to do. I got a novel to write.’

‘You’d better hurry.’

‘Really?’ He looked worried again. I didn’t know what the fuck I’d said.

‘Well. You know. Hurry in your own time.’ Because I didn’t care when he wrote his stupid novel. Why should I?

‘Right. Right. Hey, thanks.’

‘No problem.’

And that was it. I thought about what he’d said for maybe another minute and a half, and then forgot about him. For a while, anyway.

So I was all set. I had a band rehearsal that night, so I wired the VCR up to the TV in my room, and then I did a little test on it. I recorded some news show for a couple minutes, and then I played it back–A-okay. I checked out the remote–fine. I even put my tape of
The Matrix
in the machine, to see what kind of picture quality I was getting. (The kind of picture quality you get on a fifty-buck VCR was what I was getting.) Then I worked out the timer, and set it for the last part of that night’s Lakers game. Everything was cool. Or rather, everything would have been cool, if my mom hadn’t decided to interfere, although as it turned out, it was a good sort of interference.

What happened was, I got a lift home from Martha’s dad. With Martha in the car. I mean, of course Martha was in the car, because that was why her dad had turned up at the community center, but, you know. Martha was in the car. Which meant…well, not too much, if you really want to analyse it that closely. I didn’t talk a whole lot. Like I said, give me a few hours to think about it and I’m William fucking Shakespeare; I’m just not so good in real time. I guess it’s my dad’s genes coming through. He can write OK dialogue if he has enough time to think about it–like a year. But ask him the simplest question, like ‘What’s going on with you and Mom?’ and he’s, you know, ‘Duh, yeah, well, blah.’ Thanks, Dad. That’s made things real clear.

Anyway, we got in the car, and…Oh–first of all, I should tell you that it’s turning into a regular thing, which is how come I wasn’t too disgusted by my performance that night. And maybe I should confess that I nearly blew it, too. This is where Mom’s good/bad interference comes in. What happened was, she dropped into this little gallery in the neighborhood, to see if they’d be interested in exhibiting her stuff, and she got talking to the owner, who turns out to be Martha’s dad. And somehow they got on to the subject of the Little Berkeley Big Band, and like two seconds later they’ve divided up the rides. I’ll be honest here: I completely freaked out when she told me. No amount of singing her song would have calmed me down. She explained that she met this guy who lives real near and his daughter was in the band and so he was going to drop us off and pick us up this week and it was her turn next week and…

‘Stop right there.’

‘What?’

‘Do you realize what a bunch of pathetic losers they are in that band? You really expect me to sit in a car with one of them every week?’

‘I’m not asking you to date her. I’m asking you to sit in a car with her for ten minutes once a week.’

‘No way.’

‘Too late.’

‘Fine. I’m quitting the band. As from this second.’

‘You don’t think that’s an overreaction?’

‘No. Goodbye.’

And I went up to my bedroom. I meant it. I was going to quit. I didn’t care. Even if I was giving up a future career as a superstar jazz trumpeter, it was worth it if it meant not sitting in a car with Eloise and her bad breath. Or Zoe and her quote unquote gland problem (in other words her intense fatness problem.) Anyway, Mom came up five minutes later and said that she’d called the guy and canceled the ride, told him I had a doctor’s appointment first so I wouldn’t be leaving from home.

‘A doctor’s appointment? Great, so now everyone thinks I’ve got some gross disease. Thanks a lot.’

‘Jesus.’ She shook her head.

‘And anyway, how am I going to get out of coming back with them?’ I will admit, I was being pretty difficult.

She shook her head again. If I hadn’t been so mad, I might have felt sorry for her. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Just get in the car. We’ll be late.’

‘No. Now it’s too embarrassing. I’m still quitting.’

‘Paul will be disappointed. I got the impression that he had high hopes for you and Martha. He thought you sounded like…’

‘Whoa. Martha?’

‘Do you know her?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Do you like her?’

I tried to be cool about it. ‘She’s OK. I’ll just go and find my trumpet.’

Respect where it’s due to Mom: she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even smile in a way that would have made me freak out all over again. Just waited for me downstairs. She was still in the wrong, though. OK, it turned out well, but there was like a 99.9% chance (or rather, because there are maybe fifteen girls in the band, a ninety-four-point-something percent chance) that it could have been a total disaster. She didn’t know it was Martha, or even who Martha is, so she was just plain lucky.

Before we get back to me in the car with Martha, which sounds way more exciting than it actually was, there’s one more bit of the story that’s important, but I’m not too sure where to put it. It should either go here–which was roughly where it happened–or later, when I get back from rehearsal, which is where I actually discovered it, and where it has a bit more dramatic effect. But the thing is, if I put it later, you might not believe it. You might think it’s just like a story trick, or something I just made up on the spur of the moment to explain something, and it would really piss me off if you thought that. And anyway, I don’t need any dramatic effects, man. This story I need to calm down, not pump up. So I’ll tell you here: I messed up the VCR recording of the Lakers game. I was so mad that I watched five minutes of
The Matrix
, which meant removing the blank tape. I remembered to take out the
Matrix
tape, but I forgot to put another one back in. (I forgot because once Mom mentioned Martha, I was in kind of a hurry.) But I didn’t know I’d messed up then. See what I mean? If I’d left that part until later, it might have had a little kick to it–‘Oh, no, he didn’t tape the game. So how come…’ But if that little kick means you believe me any less, it’s not worth it.