Punkzilla (7 page)

At one point Carson Block put his Whopper with cheese down and asked me how old I was. I told him I was fourteen and he told me I looked younger. He was like “You look about twelve. Or eleven maybe.”

Then he started talking about how these days most kids look older than their age. He said it was because of all the chemicals in the cows and the “hormones and whatnot.”

I told him I really was fourteen and then he didn’t say anything else and he watched a country-western music channel on TV and finished his Whopper with cheese and then he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and came back out and watched some more country videos and fell asleep with his clothes on.

I eventually fell asleep in the other bed but I watched some more videos first. One was about this blond guy walking in the desert. He comes across an island oasis with tropical fruit drinks and a live mariachi band and this hot skeezer in a turquoise bikini. The whole thing turns out to be a mirage and the singer drops to his knees and finishes the song while the sun is setting and the skeezer in the bikini turns into a prickly green cactus. After that it was like a switch got turned off in my head and I fell asleep in my clothes too. I even tied my hoodie under my chin. I’m not sure why.

Hang on I’ll be right back. . . .

P check it out so the driver just pulled the bus over to the side of the road and we had to get off because some weird guy sitting near the front thought we had a gas leak. “We got a leak!” he kept turning around and pleading with everyone. He had a face like a cartoon. The bus driver made us walk like a hundred feet away while he disappeared under the bus and assessed the problem. Cars were mad zooming by us and the weird paranoid guy couldn’t stand still and the sky was sort of churning like it was going to rain again and a cop even stopped to ask what was going on so it was pretty tense. The cop made me more paranoid than the weird guy. I thought he was going to come over and question everybody but he didn’t he just hung near the bus driver and nodded a lot with his arms folded.

I wound up bumming a cigarette from the black woman with the pink shower cap who got on the bus in Portland. It was a Newport and I normally don’t like menthols but you have to take what you can get right? Man it tasted good like way better than food way way better. But I have to tell you something weird happened with the black woman P and it’s a little embarrassing and this is what it is: she thought I was a girl. I went up to her while she was packing her Newports and I asked her if I could have one and she said “You got it girl” and gave me a cigarette. Then she lit me and said “Motherfuckin’ bus always jacks up my back.”

Then the driver came walking toward us and lifted his hockey mask so he could yell and said everything was okay and we all ran back over to the bus because it started to rain.

Now we’re back on the bus and it’s raining like crazy way worse than yesterday and I have to admit that I’m afraid to look at that black woman in the shower cap. It’s like she knows something about me that’s not true but maybe it is true in some fucked up way and just to prove something to myself I’m tempted to walk over to her and whip my dick out and be like “Bitch who you callin’ a skeezer!”

I’m going to stop writing for a minute P because I’m getting too worked up and I almost just kicked the seat in front of me. I think there’s a retarded man sitting in it eating a bucket of caramel corn hang on. . . .

Okay I’m back.

And there is nobody actually sitting in front of me. That retarded dude with the bucket of caramel corn must have moved closer to the front.

I think I need to tell you more about Branson because it sort of relates to the thing that just happened outside.

So in Portland me and Branson shared a room in that place Washington House which was this low-income place for loners and street kids. There were some maniacs there too like this one guy everyone was afraid of called Fifty Watt Dave whose head was shaped like a lightbulb. He would hang out in the fourth-floor hallway with a remote-control car and drive it up to you and try and drive it over your feet and sometimes park it in front of you and talk to you like the car had a voice and say “Wanna race kid? I’m clockin’ zero to sixty in four-point-four” and weird shit like that.

The way me and Branson met was he was standing around in this parking lot outside of this bar on Burnside Street called the Crystal Ballroom. He was huffing glue out of a brown paper bag and trying to call this junior-high girl called Easy Elise on a cell phone he’d just stolen. Apparently Easy Elise used to go around bragging that she’s on a milk carton back in Iowa or Illinois or someplace. She was majorly into giving head to anyone especially if you drank Bombay gin. In that parking lot Branson was dialing her number and then huffing glue. He would dial and huff dial and huff. I was just sort of minding my own business near the sidewalk because that’s almost exactly where Carson Block dropped me off and I was holding on to my gym bag and trying to figure out what I was going to do next.

After Easy Elise didn’t answer for like the fifth time Branson threw the cell phone against a brick wall and it smashed into a thousand pieces. I was just trying to play it cool and not get too nervous when Branson asked me if I wanted to fight him. I said no and then he asked me for ten dollars but I told him I didn’t have ten dollars even though I still had about thirty bucks from Alan Skymer and then Branson just stood there sort of looking at me and started smoking a Camel Red and said “Why won’t you fight me you a little bitch?” I told him that I would fight him but I didn’t feel like it because I was tired. Then he asked me where I was from and I told him about how I hitchhiked from Missouri and about Alan Skymer and Carson Block and what their cars were like and what sort of music they listened to and the whole time Branson kept nodding but he was looking towards the entrance of the Crystal Ballroom like that little junior-high girl was going to appear. He wore this old-school Chicago Cubs hat cocked to the side and these baggy jeans and low-cut black patent leather Adidas shell toes and a white puffy ski vest with a hoodie underneath.

I asked him who he was waiting for and he said “Just this little ho. She frontin’ though. Skanky-ass juice-box.” Then he sucked hard on his cigarette and said “How old are you?”

I told him I was fourteen. I know I probably should have lied and told him I was older but I was too tired. Then I asked him how old he was and he said he was seventeen which didn’t seem right. A few months later when I saw his birth certificate I realized we were almost exactly the same age. Branson was born six days before me. In fact his birthday is the day after tomorrow and that’s partly why I gave him my iPod.

He asked me if I was in school and I said no and asked him if he was and he said “Fuck no. School’s for the future of America” and then he pulled out a pair of nunchucks from the small of his back. They were black with silver diamonds on the handles and he started doing figure eights and all these kung fu combinations. Then he put the chucks away and said “Let’s break north” and we walked across Vista Avenue over by where all these other punks and homeboys and runaway girls were hanging out and smoking blunts and listening to music. It was lots of street kids with bad acne talking about where the cops were roaming and where they slept the night before and where they could score good meth and heroine and poppers and who had learned how to cook crank down on a hot plate with Sudafed and Benadryl and Arm and Hammer baking soda and on and on. I couldn’t see where the music was coming from but it was this weird old-school trancy drum-and-bass stuff with some girl singing in the background like she was getting drugged.

This tall skinny black dude called Tron was showing everyone this scab on his dick and he was laughing about it like it was something to be proud of. He wore a fur coat and kept opening it up and dropping these fake leather pants down to his ankles and going “You see it right? Look at that shit yo!”

Branson kept asking everyone if they’d seen Easy Elise and nobody had but some kid wearing a chef’s hat said he’d heard she was in the hospital because she donated blood at the blood bank and fainted but then someone else said that that wasn’t Easy Elise that it was this other girl called Sky so Branson said “I’m out” and we left.

While we were waiting for a walk sign Branson told me how he had a room at Washington House and how the top bunk was open because his boy Tom-Tom just got caught selling digital cameras out of the back of a U-Haul and how Tom-Tom got sent to some juvy home in Corvallis where they put a computer chip in your arm.

So the really weird part that relates to what just happened outside with that old black woman in the shower cap is that at first Branson thought I was a girl too. No shit P even though he wanted to fight me. He said he thought I was some dykey butch chick from Eugene who was trying to act tough and I was like “You’d fight a girl?” and he said he’d fight a dyke any day of the week because of the fact that he got beat up by some deejay lesbian skeezer called Chocolate Yoda a few weeks before after he tried to steal some of her old Cypress Hill records. He said she was like six feet tall and punched harder than his father.

Me and Branson spent like four days hanging together before he found out I have a dick. It was fucked up too because I woke up in the middle of the night with him trying to go down my pants like he was intending to finger me in my sleep or something. I kicked him so hard I almost knocked his jaw off.

“I thought you was a bitch!” he cried holding his face.

He washed his hand in the sink like nine times in a row. I think he even put toothpaste on it.

P it’s not like I WANT to look like I do. I wish I could grow some whiskers or have a scar over my eye. I’ve even thought about cutting myself I really have just like an inch-long slit over my right eye or across my cheek because that might help me look more manly or less soft or whatever.

By the way when did you start shaving? Were you my age or did you have to wait? Puberty is like mad skipping me over. I can’t wait to start becoming a man P I swear. And I’m almost positive I’m not a homosexual like you and Jorge.

“You’d be a pretty bitch you really would” Branson said a few days after he tried going down my pants. He was smoking on the steps to the YWCA. “Them old west-side sweeties would love you.” He was talking about this group of senior citizen perverts who hang out on the west side and play dominoes and this Korean poker game called Thirteen. “Those light-ass eyes of yours. Your silver hair.” I said “It’s not silver it’s blond” but he was like “That shit is mad silver!”

You couldn’t imagine Branson being from Waldo Ohio. He seemed like he grew up on the streets of New York City or in some gang in Chicago. I figure he just watched a lot of rap videos or visited the right websites or something.

Once I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “Grow up?” he said. “I ain’t never gonna grow up. I’m like one of them donkey dudes in Pinocchio.”

Regarding my prettiness what’s weird is that my hair wasn’t even long when I arrived in Portland. My Buckner high-and-tight had just started to grow out and Branson STILL thought I was a fucking girl. I dyed my hair black a week later. Fat Larkin’s girlfriend helped me do it. Her name was Shurl and she had this little wispy mustache that she put Vaseline on. Her and Fat Larkin lived in a residential hotel around the corner from Washington House. They had this big German sheperd called Saint Ray that only had three legs.

I stole a Clairol Nice’n Easy kit from the Walgreens and even though it stunk and Shurl almost burned my scalp it worked so now even though you can see my blond roots most of my hair is black.

Me and Branson were hanging out on the steps to the YWCA because that’s where Mrs. Mitre always gave Branson a couple of bucks for carrying her bag to her car. She’s this elderly skeezer who swam everyday to ease some spinal condition. Her hands shook and she walked all hunched like a troll. She started giving me a buck too just because I was there and then me and Branson would go to the Virginia Café to play video poker. The guy behind the bar liked us because we’d help him take the chairs off the tables and mop the floor.

When he plays video poker Branson always doubles down no matter what the machine deals him so we’d either win big or lose everything. I made $114 once and it paid our Washington House rent for a month. This big guy with a pink face named O’Meara takes the rent money but he never talks to you. He just stands behind this bulletproof window all day and reads hot-rod magazines.

Spanish Dave slept on our floor for a week. He was running from some girl who claimed he got her pregnant and she was supposedly hunting him with a letter from a lawyer and a digital camcorder. Spanish Dave spoke Spanish in his sleep but English during the day. When I asked him how much Spanish he knew he said “I don’t know no fucking Spanish. I can like count to FOUR and shit but that’s it” but he was fluent in his sleep P I swear. He’s fourteen like me and Branson but he has hairy armpits and he would get people to give him a quarter to see naked pictures of his mother that he downloaded off the Internet. “That’s her I swear for God” he would say. “Look at them titties kid. Nice right?”

Man my stomach feels twisted in knots. I just hope I get to Memphis okay so I can see you P. My hand is mad killing me too so I’m going to end this letter.

I just heard an announcement that we’re getting close to some place in Idaho where we’ll get like a half hour to walk around and get something to eat.

Maybe that lady with the shower cap will give me another cigarette if I’m nice to her? Maybe I should tell her my name is Shirley?

October 10, 2007

Dear Jamie,

Hi, honey. How are you? I hope well.

I haven’t received a letter from you in a few weeks, and I just wanted to check in with you to see if you’re okay. I spoke with Master Sergeant Mastaglio the other day, and he mentioned that schoolwise you were doing better. In fact he shared the good news that you got a B+ on your most recent history test. I was very proud of you when I heard that, Jamie. It honestly made my day. He also told me that you’re still struggling a bit with your Monday drill ratings. Just remember what your father told you: Marching and maneuvering a rifle is like anything else; it just takes concentration and a little elbow grease. I hope you’re still taking your medication. I know your father and I were very detailed in our request to the infirmary nurse, as was Dr. Carroll, and as you already know, she thinks that Buckner can be a very positive step for you.