Sorta Like a Rock Star (12 page)

She feels his hand and the coin, and then says, “Damn it!”

“You kicking or receiving?” Old Man Thompson asks.

“Kicking,” Old Man Linder answers for me, and then slaps me on the butt before saying, “Go get ’er, kid,” and then he sits down.

“Let the battle begin!” Old Man Thompson says, and all of the old people clap and hoot.

“The problem with women of your generation,” JOO opens with, “is that you waste all your time doing community service, harboring dreams of a college education, when you should be trying to find a husband who will put a roof over your head and food in your refrigerator. Smarten up, chippie. Coming here is a waste of time. We’ll all be dead in a few weeks anyway. The time to find a husband is now, while you’re still skinny, because you’ll be a heifer in less than ten years. Do you really want to end up a spinster?”

“Ooooo!” the crowd says, and Joan of Old nods confidently.

“Okay. Okay,” I say. “Joan of Old is so ancient.”

“How ancient is she?” my manager yells, just like I taught him.

“She’s so ancient her elementary school teacher had to chisel her report cards in stone, and Joan had to ride a dinosaur to school every day.”

“Hey!” the crowd says, and cheers, repeating my silly joke to each other, nodding their approval.

This joke may not be funny to you, but you have to consider my audience—old people love safe corny jokes.

No smile from Joan. Nothing.

“When I was a young woman there were no dinosaurs about, but there were lonely plain homely girls who never got asked to dance by handsome promising boys. All of these ugly girls ended up living lonely virginal lives in depressingly small government-subsidized apartments, because no man would have them. When I was your age, we usually found these dinosaur-faced girls at the old people’s home, doing community service.”

“Oooo!” the crowd moans.

I swallow hard. That one sorta cut me.

Do I really have a dinosaur face? And how would she know, since she’s blind? Did someone
tell her
I have a dinosaur face?

It’s true that boys don’t ever ask me to dance. I’m not all that jazzed up for boys or anything—why would I be after seeing what A-hole Oliver and company did to my mom—but I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life either, after all of my boys (The Five) marry stupid women, younger versions of Joan of Old.

And I really don’t want to end up like my mom.

I swallow once and look over at my manager. Old Man Linder has the white towel draped over his shoulder, but he is nodding confidently, showing me his old pink palms, saying, “Relax,” so I roll my head along my shoulders, look out into the crowd, and can see that they look very concerned.

“Joan is so old,” I retort, “she farts dust.”

“Hey!” the crowd roars, and I lift my hands in the air.

But Joan of Old is undaunted. She’s not smiling.

“Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote,” JOO says, “ ‘The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.’ I offer that little tidbit to you as a form of future consolation, when we are all dead and buried and you are all alone in some federally funded box of an apartment—manless and childless—thinking about your barren womb.”

“Below the belt!” my manager yells.

“Watch yourself, Joan,” Old Man Thompson says.

“Joan, didn’t you used to date Nietzsche, back in the 1800s? After your husband died,” I say, and a few old men cheer, but most of the old people moan, so I know my joke didn’t go over so well. Spoofing on dead husbands is sorta off limits around here. Unwritten rule.

“Watch yourself, Amber,” Old Man Thompson says. “Let’s keep this wholesome. Good clean fun.”

“What do you know, child?” Joan of Old says. “ ‘Life always gets harder toward the summit—the cold increases, responsibility increases.’ Also Nietzsche. You haven’t even begun to feel pain, young woman, but you will. You will feel pain. Life is hell, and your life has only just begun.”

Joan sorta stares at me through her pink wrinkly eyelids, and suddenly, this old Nietzsche-quoting woman chills my bones. Maybe she’s right. Maybe there is nothing but pain in my future. Endless pain and then you die. Can this be what’s true?

The room is dead quiet, and I haven’t got a joke left in my head. I feel that this might be the end, that I am about to be defeated by Joan of Old for the first time, and that hope is going to die shortly in the Methodist Retirement Home along with everything and everyone else.

But then I remember that I have God on my side, so I pray silently.

Come on, JC. Just one little joke. Let me keep hope alive for these old people who are all about to die. Let me give them a little hope—enough so that they can keep on believing until they croak.

And then I have it!

I walk over to Joan, say, “That’s okay. Be as pessimistic as you want, JOO. I’ll still love you anyway,” and give her a big sloppy kiss on the cheek. Joan’s mouth opens wide in this very dramatic way, and then I know I have her. Everyone howls with laughter. “You cute little old wrinkly incredibly depressing kook—I love ya!” I give her another big sloppy kiss on the other cheek, and then Joan is blushing, and—

“She smiles!” Thompson says. “Joan of Old smiled for the briefest of seconds. Do we have a witness?”

Half of the old people in the room yell “Aye!”

“That’s my girl!” Old Man Linder says as he lifts my left hand into the air, proclaiming me victorious once again.

“Amber Appleton is the winner and your undisputed champion!”

The old people who can stand do, and all of them begin to congratulate me, which quickly yields to stories of grandchildren who never visit—these tales are accompanied by endless wallet-fold pictures that show the grandchildren at various stages of their lives and are presented (usually) in chronological order, one picture per each year the child has attended school—talk about the cost of grocery items fifty years ago, the weather over the last eight odd decades or so, homemade arthritis remedies, the inadequacy of social security checks, who died this week, and, of course, recapping the trickier jigsaw puzzles recently assembled.

Before we leave the community room, Bobby Big Boy visits the lap of almost every old person in the building, and they all smile as they pat BBB’s head and scratch his belly. My dog is great with old people—so gentle, so calm—it’s like he actually knows that old people are brittle and fragile and about to die.

Just before I bust out of the old folks home, I walk over to the far corner where Joan of Old is sitting all alone facing a wall, which she thinks is a window.

“Joan?” I say.

“What do
you
want, Ms. Hopeful? Come to gloat? Come to rub it in?”

“Do you want to pet my dog before I go?”

“That filthy beast? Ha!”

“You almost made me cry back there. That bit about no boys liking me. That really cut to the quick, as you old people like to say. You couldn’t see it—because you are blind—but my bottom lip was quivering. True.”

“Truthfully?”

“Yeah. It was a close call. I felt the tears coming.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“I’ll probably cry about it later tonight, when I’m all alone.”

“You don’t have to say that,” Joan of Old says, “but thank you.”

“You really are pretty mean and depressing, JOO.”

“Well, I try. And I really hate to admit it,” Joan of Old says, “but you’re pretty hopeful and funny, Amber Appleton. But that kiss was a cheap trick, and I’m going to protest the battle, just so you know.”

I catch her smiling again, but I don’t call her on it.

The smile vanishes like a flame in the wind, and Joan of Old says in this very sad voice, “Do you know that you are the only person who has ever made me smile since my Lawrence died back in ’82?”

This is depressing news, even though I realize it is a weird sorta compliment.

I sigh. “I wish you were the only person who ever made me feel like crying, but I can’t give you that honor, Joan of Old. Sorry.”

“ ‘Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to be unable any longer to defend himself.’ That goes for women like us too. Remember that, Amber. Remember that.”

“Nietzsche?”

Joan of Old nods once and then says, “I hope I don’t die before I make you cry, Amber. I’m going to beat your young little hopeful butt one of these days.”

“May we have many more battles,” I say, and then go collect BBB from the lap of Agnes the Plant Talker. Agnes talks to any old plant and pretends it’s her son, who lives in California and never visits.

As I put on my jackets, Old Man Linder gives me one more shoulder squeeze and says, “You were brilliant up there, kid. You keep us feeling young with your youthful ha-has and your skylarking.”

“Can I get a hug, Old Man Linder?” I ask.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” he says, and then gives me this very long hug, his nasty breath making my neck sorta wet, which I tolerate, because he’s got oxygen tubes up his nose and is probably going to die any day now, plus I really like hugs.

“See you next week, Old Man Linder.”

“If I live that long!” he says, and then gives me a wrinkly wink.

“ ’Bye, all you crazy old people!” I yell across the common room, and then BBB and I walk the depressing hallways with the dusty fake plants in the corners.

“How’d you get that little dog in my building?” Door Woman Lucy says to me when I walk past her, which makes me laugh.

“How’d you like the hot chocolate and Snickers?” I ask her.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking ’bout.”

Door Woman Lucy and I share a smile. She’s good people. Truly.

I retrieve Donna’s bike from the bush, put BBB in the basket, and begin my ride back to Donna’s house.

As I pedal, I start to get a bad feeling. I start to feel like I have everything all wrong, and that everyone—all of the many people who are not like me—everyone else is right, and all my hopefulness is just childish bullcrap.

I mean, yes, there are a few people who like to watch me do my thing—taking on the school board and Prince Tony, singing with The Korean Divas for Christ, defeating Joan of Old on a weekly basis—but it really doesn’t mean anything, because there is only one of me and so many of the people who are not like me, and maybe I’m just an amusing distraction for those other people. Maybe I’m just a freak. A sideshow.

Speaking of sideshows, here’s all-time Amber-and-her-mom moment number three:

When I was a little girl Mom always took me to see the circus every year, whether we could afford it or not—all through elementary school. There were years when we couldn’t even afford to turn on the heat and had to go without eating meals from time to time, but Mom always came through with circus tickets for us, and when we were at the circus, she’d always buy me cotton candy, popcorn, peanuts, soda, and a souvenir—sometimes a stuffed elephant or monkey, sometimes a T-shirt or a hat or a poster of someone being shot out of a cannon or walking the tightrope or a million clowns getting out of a tiny car.

I didn’t even really like the circus particularly, but I liked to look at my mother’s face when we were there watching all the acts, because she always looked like a kid. She got so excited whenever the guy got in the cage with the lion, or the motorcycle guy rode around the inside of a metal ball super fast on his bike, or the trapeze artists swung and did flips. All that stuff amazed my mom—she’d be on the edge of her seat the whole time, and if you looked at the faces of all the kids around us and then looked at my mom’s face, you’d see that same sense of wonderment.

I remember when I first
really
understood that my mom was a kid at heart—it was the last time Mom and me went to the circus when I was in sixth grade and was sorta outgrowing the circus and other little kid things too. I didn’t really want to go to the circus that year, but since it was a tradition, I didn’t say anything to Mom. And then we were there in the middle of it all, in the big tent, seeing the same tired acts, and I was bored out of my mind until I noticed how into the circus Mom was—how much going meant to her. You could tell just by looking at her face—Mom frickin’ loved the circus.

I wanted to be able to light up my mother’s face like the circus did.

It was an important moment for me.

So maybe that’s when I started trying to be something more than I was, but truthfully—five years later—no one really takes me all that seriously. At best, I’m just an interesting blip in people’s lives—an amusing footnote. Which is probably why my dad split and my mom can’t stay sober and all of her boyfriends ditch us after only a few months or so. Sometimes I wonder why I try at all. What’s the point?

In an effort to prep for my battles with Joan of Old, I did some research on Nietzsche at the library. He was an atheist like Donna and Ricky. And he once wrote: “What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?”

That statement made me mad at first, because I am a Catholic. But it also made me think. How do we really know that we didn’t just make up God? What proof do we really have of God’s existence? And if God doesn’t exist, is there really any reason to be hopeful at all?

I asked Father Chee these questions a few weeks ago, and he said this is what faith is all about—not knowing for sure. I would sure say that was a BS answer had it not come from FC, because my Man of God sorta has something cool going on. He seems enlightened, and not just because he’s Asian. I believe in FC (and God) so I kept and keep holding on to hope for some reason, even though it does get harder and harder the higher you climb toward life’s summit—like Joan of Old and Nietzsche both say. True? True.

All these thoughts have me down—so I really don’t feel like cooking dinner for Donna and Ricky. I can’t even think up one recipe anyway.

Maybe I should skip dinner and go to Private Jackson’s house?

His pad is on the edge of town close to the ghetto. It’s where I go whenever I am feeling blue.

CHAPTER 10