Rats Saw God (5 page)

“You're a real dadaist,” I said.

“Excusez-moi?”

“A dadaist,” I repeated. “We studied them in my egghead classes in Florida. They were painters, writers, sculptors in the twenties who believed in art without coherent meaning. Nothing they did had to be justified. The more abstract, the weirder something was, the better.”

“So if you, as the art critic, were to say my masterpiece here represented the death of a subculture or a man putting away childish things, I, as the artist, would say…”

“Sod off, wanker. It's a skateboard in concrete,” I concluded for him in my best Sid Vicious cockney snarl.

“I love it! Art for the masses.”

Doug and I watched with equal measures of wistfulness and bemusement as the crowd of freshmen gathered in front of the skateboard ramp we had willed to Junior Cassidy. We couldn't see much from our spot across the gym—only Junior's head as he spun at the top of each run—but we
heard the requisite “
oohs
” from Grace High's newest fodder.

“We might be making a mistake,” I said to Doug. We were wearing our homemade T-shirts freshly emblazoned with our club slogan, G
O WITH
GOD. Like I'
M WITH
S
TUPID
shirts, our uniforms included arrows. My arrow pointed toward Doug, assuming I could keep him on my left; Doug's pointed down toward… well, hell is where he said, though I think most of us would agree his crotch was the first whistle-stop on that journey.

GOD was the name Doug coined for our new club, the Grace Order of Dadaists. No one had yet ventured over to our table. Several frightened ninth graders had stood at a safe distance and pointed at the artwork Doug and I displayed. The first was the original skateboard tombstone. The second, our pièce de résistance, was what I believed was scaring everyone. On a television monitor we ran a video Doug and I had produced. By editing together half-second clips of happy teenagers garnered from fast food, soda, and jeans commercials then splicing in machete, arrow, and axe mutilation scenes from Stan's collection of teen slasher films and scoring it with Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World,” we had created a grotesque and mystifying barrage of images. I was glad we, as dadaists, were not obliged to explain it.

When freshman orientation ended we had yet to hand out any of our brochures, let alone sign up one member. Skate or Die, on the other hand, had swelled its membership to twenty-plus. Junior wouldn't be back the next day for the registration of the rest of the student body. GOD would be.

During the first couple hours of nonfreshmen orientation, events proceeded not unlike the day before. We were fortunate the larger crowds forced more students nearer our booth; it wasn't long before plucky individualists hovered long enough to pick up our brochures. Doug and I had had our first philosophical argument concerning GOD four days earlier when he suggested I produce a brochure on my Mac. I argued that true dadaists would never produce sensical prose in hopes of increasing their numbers. Their art, I insisted, would serve as their calling card. He maintained, and rightly so I discovered later, that the original dadaists, our spiritual forefathers, had written at great length about their contribution to the art world. Because we were dealing with his five-hundred-dollar bet and he had already checked out and read
Dada: In Theory, in Practice,
I relented.

On the opening fold of the brochure I placed a black-and-white photo of the intellectual founder of dadaism, Tristan Tzara, above the headline, GOD
ISN'T FOR EVERYONE.
Inside, Doug drew his own crude rendition of Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel installations above lists of relatively famous dadaist painters, sculptors, authors, and performance artists. Doug and I collaborated on the inside copy, which read:

D
ADAISM IS NOT DEAD
!

• D
ID YOUR SECOND-GRADE TEACHER SCOLD YOU FOR COLORING AN APPLE PURPLE AND THE SKY RED, THUS DESTROYING YOUR ARTISTIC URGES?
I
F SO,
G
O WITH
GOD.

• D
O PAINTINGS OF
M
EDIEVAL NOBLEMEN OR DREAMY
R
ENAISSANCE-ERA PANORAMAS OF
E
UROPEAN COUNTRYSIDES ALL BEGIN TO LOOK THE SAME TO YOU?
I
F SO,
G
O WITH
GOD.

• D
O
PREDICTABLE, MUNDANE, ORDINARY, COMMON,
AND
ROUTINE
SOUND LIKE BAD WORDS TO YOU?
I
F SO,
G
O WITH
GOD.

T
HE QUESTION ALL OF US SHOULD BE ASKING OURSELVES IS NOT WHY, BUT RATHER, WHY NOT
?

I left my post for a few minutes to pick up my sophomore schedule. Upon returning, I was surprised to see a fair-sized crowd of potential dadaists clustered around our booth. Doug was in the process of explaining dadaist doctrine to three girls.

“What's the point?” the shortest of the three said. I was sure I recognized her from somewhere, but I couldn't place her.

“Exactly!” Doug answered. The conversation sounded remarkably like Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” skit.

“So, what you're saying is this video, this skateboard thing, there's no meaning behind them?” She was trying to understand. “Are they even supposed to evoke a certain reaction?”

“Not a
certain
reaction,” Doug said, “just
a
reaction.”

Then it happened. Doug was set upon by the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. With fists clenched around the GOD brochure, he began shouting before he reached our booth.

“Did you write this? Did you write this?” he ranted, slapping
the brochure across his left hand. “God is for everyone. Everyone!”

I was suddenly happy Doug was the de facto leader of this group and I was merely an unofficial member. Predictably, Doug made the most of the spotlight.

“You're wrong, brother.” My comrade matched his accuser's volume as he quoted an early draft of our brochure. “‘GOD is not for fascists, clones, wannabes, television junkies, spirit heads, or for that matter, zealots.'”

“Atheist,” the FCA president croaked.

“No,” Doug said, “dadaist.”

Most of the crowd didn't know what to make of the exchange, but the FCA faculty adviser confiscated our brochures and made Doug and me take off our shirts and wear them inside out.

“I guess that's what you mean by
a
reaction,” said the short girl who had been questioning Doug. I finally remembered where I had seen her. She was one of the girls who'd said good-bye to my sister when she left Texas.

She signed her name, Wanda Varner, on our club membership roll; her two friends signed up after her. They beat the rush. Doug's eloquence convinced fourteen of what I assumed to be the school's disenfranchised to join up. Fourteen, however, was the number I dreaded most. We needed fifteen members, and the onus was on me to provide the last signature. As we walked to the office to apply for our charter, I told Doug I would relent and sign. “Don't worry,” he said. “It's taken care of.” He took out the list and signed “Tom Pittman” at the bottom.

“Who's that?” I asked.

“The president of the FCA,” he answered.

•   •   •

Wanda Varner sat in front of me in geometry. Of course, everyone sat in front of me in geometry. My punctuality on the first day of classes was owed completely to my desire to sit in the back of the classroom. Luckily, my last name usually protected me from anal-retentive teachers who insisted on alphabetical-order seating charts. I liked it when it took a teacher nearly a semester to learn my name. Not speaking, not volunteering answers, not turning in especially brilliant homework—I should market my anonymity strategy. I remember my mother coming home angry from a mandatory, early-morning, parent-teacher conference because my teacher couldn't, for the life of her, remember who I was despite the A I was making in her class.

Teachers all call me Steven. They do this because I don't correct them on the first day of school when all the Jonathans change to Jacks and the Roberts become Bobs. On the first day of geometry, Wanda became Dub. When she said it, Mrs. Lanigan flinched.

“Did you say ‘Bud,' honey, as in ‘Rosebud'?”

“No. I said ‘Dub,' as in ‘rub-a-dub-dub.'”

Most of the class turned to look at this strange girl. If she were pretty, she did her best to hide it. Her hair was black, but it was the jet black that indicated the original color was smothered in dye. She wore no makeup. She dressed in men's blue jeans a couple sizes too big and a Rice (Houston's Harvard of the South) sweatshirt—also oversized.
At the risk of sounding redundant, her mouth, too, was uniquely large, but she had those puffy, Uma Thurman lips which, judging from recent
Sassy
cover models, was the current standard of beauty. What else? Green eyes, B cup, small feet, no jewelry,
Whole Earth
backpack—the kind favored by outdoorophiles or the studious, as its capacity is sufficient to store the complete
Encyclopedia Britannica
.

Seven days later she spoke to me.

“So, you're not really an asshole?”

I scanned my active snappy-comeback file but came up empty. I looked like a goob, standing in the doorway of Mrs. Lanigan's class, mouth open, saying nothing.

“Speak boy, speak,” Dub beckoned. She even patted her thighs encouragingly. She was pleased with how our initial conversation was proceeding.

“Who said I was an asshole?” I managed.

“I just sort of deduced it,” Dub answered. “We've seen plenty of each other. The first time I saw you, you looked like you wanted to kill somebody—you were taking Sarah to the airport. Then, you didn't say anything to me when I joined your club. And now you've sat behind me for a week, and you still don't say a word. I'm like, who does the boy think he is—Sting?”

“What made you decide now that I'm not so bad?” It occurred to me
she
hadn't spoken to
me
on any of these occasions, either.

Dub began walking to her next class, and I followed though it was the wrong direction. “I told Sarah in a letter what an egomaniac I assumed you were. She wrote back that
you weren't all that bad. She said you just don't say much.”

“Oh.” (Good ol' Sis.) “Wait a minute. I've been meaning to ask. Why do you call yourself Dub if your name is Wanda?”

“With a name like Wanda, my only career options were running point for a roller derby team or waitressing at a truck stop.”

“But why ‘Dub'?” I said, realizing I was going to be late to world history.

“I started signing all my papers ‘W. Varner.' People began calling me ‘W.' It just got shortened to ‘Dub,'” she said. “So, when are we going to have our first meeting?”

“Meeting of what?”

“GOD, dork,” she said. I didn't know if I liked a stranger establishing pet names this early in a relationship. “We
are
planning on entering a float in the homecoming parade, aren't we? Every other club, except Skate or Die, is.”

The bell rang, and I realized I was standing in Dub's amused English class. Dub, on first meeting, had already subjected me to public humiliation and a tardy slip. I should have recognized the omen. On the bright side, the bell prevented me from answering the question. I mean, could you see me working on a homecoming float?

•   •   •

“She wants to do what?” Doug said between cheese Tater Tots. We had been hitting the Sonic Drive-in daily for lunch. We parked on the “nerd” side and made fun of the socials who sat in the sun on the “cool” side.

“She thinks we ought to enter a float in the homecoming parade,” I answered.

“I tell you. The chick is wigging. I mean, imagine it: a big banner across a flatbed truck with you and me sitting on a couple bales of hay, smiling and shouting ‘Beat the Mustangs!'” Doug was waving food around the El Camino. “Tell her to join the Buccaneer Babes if she wants to bake cupcakes for football players.” Doug paused. “On the other hand, tell her we think her idea is keen or boss or rad—”

He could have gone on, but I interrupted. “You're the pope. You tell her.”

“Better yet, we'll call a meeting. We'll explain true dadaist canon to the acolytes.”

Calling a meeting—we hadn't done this before; it presented new challenges. With Skate or Die, the skaters just hung out in the same places they always had. Fund-raising had involved emptying everyone's pockets of excess lunch money to pay for beer or spray paint. Neither of us had contemplated anything but the inception of GOD. Responsibility, we sensed, loomed.

“How do other clubs call meetings?” Doug asked in the dejected manner of a visionary asked to pay for his program.