Red Earth and Pouring Rain (28 page)

See, I don’t know what it was like at yours, but at Hilltop, there were the Punkers and the Trendies, the Lot Dead Stoners,
the Ethnics, the Jocks and the Cheers, the Nerds, the Super Nerds, the Artos, the Jesus Gnomes, and the Nobodies. Sometimes
a Punker would go out with a New-Wavish Trendy, and sometimes a Nerd would sneak a smoke with one of the Dead, but mostly
the caste rules were maintained with slavish obedience and enforced by vicious ridicule. You were judged for everything and
could be ostracized for anything, and I mean anything, the shoes you wore, your parents, your car, your religion, your clothes,
especially if you were a woman. So when I sit down to lunch with Mercy Fuller Cunningham a ripple passes among the assembled
multitudes —here is a confirmed Arto Super Nerd breaking bread with
the most exalted and rosy-breasted of the Cheers: Damn, I say, old man, what is this modern world coming to? Jolly bad form,
what?

But I ignore the giggles and the sniggers, and actually exult in them, because for my passion I am enduring the slings and
gibes of unbelievable conformity. I am able to endure anything. During the next few weeks I spend all my money on clothes,
and wearing only underwear, lift weights in front of the mirror. I practice saying “Yo!” I eat with Mercy often and try to
make conversation with her friends, all of whom react to me with careful politeness. Mercy always introduces me: this is my
smart friend Tom, he’s a poet. I get the feeling that this just heightens their ineffable feeling of superiority. And sometimes
I just cannot believe these people, and at these times I get the feeling that Mercy is embarrassed by them. Like there’s this
one time, lunch again, and Salma walks by, Salma is this Pakistani girl, a power at math, solves differential equations in
her head, and she has black, amazingly beautiful hair, that she lets hang in a thick coil to below her knees, and Salma walks
on by, and Mercy’s friends Mary and Ellen and Bill and Steve, all of them bat their hands in front of their noses, smiling.
“What?” I say, feeling this nervous smile on my lips.

“Don’t you know?” Craig says. “They never wash it, the hair.” Craig and John are these two handsome buzz-cut black guys, both
football players, and now both of them are sitting there smiling at me. I have a mad impulse to lean over and grab them by
the collars and shout, what the fuck are
you
laughing at? but Mercy puts a hand on my arm, under the table, and so I sit there and they start talking about something
else.

I want to tell Ling about this, but instead I talk to her about end-of-term papers or some such nonsense. She wants to come
over and pick up a reference book I have, and I try to put her off, I’ll bring it tomorrow to school, and she says, what is
your problem? so I say, all right. At my house, on the stairs up to my room, her nose begins to twitch, and a full three feet
before she reaches the door she bursts out, “What
is
that smell? Incense?”

She walks into the room and stops short. The walls are covered with Italian madonnas, sad-eyed women with pure, spiritual
expressions and incredible sexual potential.

“Oh, Tom,” Ling says. “Oh, oh, Tom.”

From the next day on, she starts to leave Xeroxed articles in my
desk, articles with two-part titles like
The Making and Breaking of Marilyn Monroe:
A Post-feminist Perspective and Men, Women, Sex, and War: Gender Politics and Violence among the Kikuyu and
Complex Dream or Simple Need: Towards a Bio-genetic Understanding of the Male Sexual Impulse
(the last by a woman named Emmaline Shakti Sharpstown). I want to tell Ling, thanks, but I don’t need these, I understand
only too well the shoddy symbolisms of my psyche, the grunting subterfuges of my id, but I am too embarrassed to even talk
about it.

So the days go by and my GPA plummets and Mrs. Christiansen gives back my papers with large contemptuous C’s scrawled across
the front, and pretty soon the whole world knows I’m going mad. I actually hear a pimply little freshman tell her equally
pimply friend, “That’s the guy whose obsessing over Mercy Fuller Cunningham —he’s gone crazy.” I walk down the halls in my
new Reeboks and my new haircut like some grotesque marked by fire: people stop talking when I draw near, and will look anywhere
but into my eyes. And while this is happening I get a sense of some weird empathy from the Ethnics —I turn around in the cafeteria
one day and there’s Muhammed Ziai, a sophomore, the only kid in school of Iranian descent, and he turns away quickly but not
before I see this sad smile on his face. This keeps on happening to me, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Cubans stare at
me absently and then flick their eyes away. Meanwhile, I wonder if Mercy Fuller Cunningham is aware of all this, and surely
she must be, but every time I make some feeble effort to break the spell she does something that pulls me right back in, all
these little touches and smiles and I didn’t see you today, Tommy, I missed you, all so innocent that then and now I waver
between thinking of her as the proverbial cock-goading bitch and a poor misunderstood generous girl trapped by her beauty.

So on it goes. I cycle between depression and expansive happiness, and the sight of lovers, of any two people, arouses in
me a morbid, hateful jealousy. Even the sight of a bleached blond
Sheena of the Jungle
swinging into the arms of her Great White Lover makes me sullen, even as Ling snorts: “If she actually rides that lion this
thing gets an extra two points.” Noting my brooding fanatic countenance, she quiets down and pretends to watch the movie for
a minute or two, then says, “I’ll bet you five bucks she gets tied to a stake by chanting tribesmen in the next
thirty minutes.” When even that fails to get a response out of me she bursts out —the first time she has said anything to
me directly about this —she explodes, “If it’s going to do this to you, why the fuck won’t you talk to her?”

I look at her, startled, because this is the first time I have ever heard her use the word
fuck
. I want to tell her I can’t, because how can anyone live without hope? but instead I shrug. I lean forward into the TV screen
and she lets it drop and never says anything about it again. I can’t tell her that I want it to happen all by itself, that
I don’t want to say anything. In my fantasies I make millions and buy up Manhattan. In my fantasies I bomb the hell out of
Cambodia and sleek women raise their black dresses for me spontaneously, in the backs of Washington limousines.

Toward the end of the semester Mercy Fuller Cunningham throws a party, and this time I get invited. The invitation is embossed,
and comes in a heavy cream-colored envelope which she leaves in my desk, on top of an article entitled
Ego and Transference: A Post-post-modern Perspective
. I spend the next two weeks planning, I study myself, I study the objective, and, so to speak, the ground. I consider my
clothes and try to remember if I’ve ever heard Mercy saying anything about haberdashery. I try to think Tom Cruise. I watch
her friends. I flip quickly between Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera: “Women Who Love Too Much” and “How to Get the Most out
of Your Relationship.” I borrow money.

So finally the day arrives, and I won’t put you through a description of my immediate preparations. I arrive exactly one hour
and fifteen minutes late, which delay, by my calculations, conveys the exact intensity of cool I desire. And, I shouldn’t
forget, I drive up in my mother’s Volvo, for which I have negotiated and wheedled and pretended impending nervous breakdown.
But nobody’s outside on the patio, so nobody sees the car but that’s all right, I knock, and Mercy opens the door, simple
white dress, off elegant shoulders that have the exact and right degree of definition and bone, the light behind glows through
the dress and highlights the hair, some kind of natural but wet lipstick, all perfect and framed by the natural proscenium
of the door.

“Oh, Tom,” she says, “your hair looks great.”

I suppose I should confess that I had, as the final touch on ensemble that night, smeared some soft gray goop into my locks,
and had combed
it back gently, as the tube advised, to get that slick but elegant wet look. This was the moment for decisive action, I had
thought.

“Thanks,” I say. “You’re, you’re dazzling tonight.” In the Volvo on the way up to the house I had practiced being worldly
and poetic all at the same time. Think Cruise meets Byron, I’d said to myself, Donne genetically grafted onto a Don Johnson
carcass.

She takes me in and I sense heads turning, and she introduces me to some of her friends, and I nod at others I’ve met before.
I can see Craig dancing in the next room. Everyone’s sort of golden in the gentle light from lamps, and they’re all standing
around leaning on things, hands touching, arms curled comfortably around each other, drinking things from iced glasses. There’s
no sign of Mercy’s parents. I talk to her for a few minutes and then the doorbell chimes again and she goes. I listen to the
group she’s left me with for a few minutes and they’re talking about people I don’t know. So then I clear my throat and say,
“I guess I’ll go get a drink.” They all turn to look at me.

I get my drink, gin and tonic, and stand by the bar. The room stretches away from me and everywhere there’s people talking
to each other. Craig brushes past me, “Hey, Dude!” I look at the print on the wall, some kind of birds in flight thing, and
then I look at the next one. I finish my drink and go back to the bar for another one. I read the spines of the books on a
shelf in the hall. Then I go up the stairs and wait in line for the bathroom. The two girls ahead of me are both in pink dresses,
and are talking about going away in the summer. I try desperately to think of something to say but then the bathroom door
opens and they go in together. After I finish I head down the stairs cradling my glass, and I hear Mercy’s voice from directly
below me.

“Oh, but he
is
sweet,” she says.

I feel my face flush and I want to wind up and throw the glass across the room to shatter at the wall, but suddenly I’m down
the stairs, through them all and past the bar and into the foyer and out of the door. I never see Mercy, and then I’m in the
car heading home.

In my room I realize I still have her glass. I put it down on my dresser and peer through the darkness at me in the mirror,
at my hair and my new white jacket with zippers, pastel shirt, thin black belt, and I back away to get all of me in the mirror,
trip over my two dumbbells on the floor and sit down with’ a jarring shock that races from my
tailbone up into my head, and in that moment of real pain, as I look at the top of my head in the mirror, I understand exactly
why I am trapped: it is my arrogance, my wiseass secondhand pitiful literary smarminess, my ambition that entangles me. So
I get up and get her glass and walk into my bathroom and switch on the light. I open a new pack of Bics and shake them out
onto the sink, so that they lie in untidy echelon on the porcelain. Then I take up a pair of scissors and start to clip off
my hair. It comes off in tidy swathes and I lay them one by one in the glass. When I’ve finished cutting I squirt lather onto
my scalp and set to work with the Bics. My skull comes up blue and bumpy and innocent. The razors scrape and resound through
my head, and I cut myself often. When I’ve finished I mop up the lather with a white towel and sprinkle after-shave into my
hands. It stings my flesh intolerably and starts the tears from my eyes.

So I take up the glass and go outside, onto the road. I start walking. It is dark, and I am looking for a body of water. This
is a gesture I want, one which I do not understand completely myself, but by now I have accepted the necessity of gestures.
I walk for a long time. Near morning I find a small pond in somebody’s yard. There are trees around me, and trucks are whistling
by on a highway. I lean over a fence and underhanded toss the glass into the water, and even the small splash it makes scares
a covey of ducks into the air. Then I start walking back.

When I turn down the road to school, my thighs are aching and it is mid-morning. I walk in through the main gate, then into
the halls. People turn and look at me, and by the time I reach the cafeteria a string of kids trails behind me. Inside, the
buzz falters and dies down and then there is silence. Mercy, as usual, is sitting in the middle and to the back. She is eating
a sandwich, it’s in her hand and there is a plate in front of her, her body is turned sideways and her back is straight, and
there are people around her on the benches and at her feet are two of her acolytes, lacing up football boots. I walk up and
slide onto the chair in front of her, and then say, in a very clear and proud voice, “I love you, Mercy Fuller Cunningham.”
Then I lean over and put my head in her plate.

When I straighten up she is looking at me, the sandwich still in the air, and in her eyes there is not love, not pity, not
horror, not repulsion, not abhorrence —forgive the Jamesian flight, but it is appropriate —
not loathing, not contempt, not scorn, not derision, not ridicule, not jeers, not sarcasm, not concern, not empathy, not pain,
not pleasure, not humor, not sympathy, not disappointment, not discouragement, not dismay, not disillusionment, not despondency,
not dissatisfaction, not shock, not alarm, not fear, not anxiety, not dread, not anything but this and only this: embarrassment.
And so, then, I am free.

So she gets up and rushes out, followed by her friends. I sit there. Leaning over has stretched my skin and opened up some
of the cults on my head, and so I sit there smiling, blood and mayonnaise dripping off my face. Then Ling and Sarah come rushing
in and take me home.

So what else is left to tell? My parents were called in to talk to my teachers, and I spent a lot of my evenings getting counseled
by their professional friends. I didn’t need the counseling but it made them feel better, and I guess I got a sort of quick
lab course in The Problems and Questions of Modern Psychiatric Science. Schoolwise I struggled to catch up and Mrs. Christiansen
gave me back my gnarly term paper on
Ethan Brand
with what I think was an overly kind B+. My grades that last semester weren’t so hot but Pomona had already accepted me and
I didn’t screw up really badly enough for them to go through the hassle of canning me at that late date. Sarah and I went
to the senior prom together and slow-danced defiantly to each and every song. And the last time I saw Mercy Fuller Cunningham
was at the end of the summer when Ling and I were doing our ritual good-bye to the video store at the mall. We wanted to do
one last huge bad movie marathon, so here we are stacking up
Frantic
and
Conan the Barbarian
and
Barbarella
, and I have just had the incredible good luck to stumble on
Genghis Khan
, with John Wayne as Genghis, when Mercy walks in with some guy. Now at this point I haven’t really seen her for a while,
because I’ve been allowed to skip AP English. I guess they figured I might start attacking her or reciting sonnets at her,
so they played it safe. So now Mercy freezes between DRAMA and HORROR, her mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and then
I say, totally cool and nearly suave, “Looking for a movie, Mercy?”