Tales of the Madman Underground (16 page)

Rev Dave, the Youth Minister there, was sort of all right, for a guy who probably just never really recovered from spending his high school years in church youth group. You just had to make sure you didn’t give him a chance to go after your soul, because as a sales guy he was a slow warm-up but a hell-on-wheels closer.

The New Life didn’t want you to hang out there and then go out to drink or toke up or have sex, so you had to sign in and out, and you had to let Rev Dave look at your pupils and smell your breath every time you came back in. I always wondered how he found out if you’d been having sex.

Anyway, a nice thing about New Life, you could get phone calls there, and make local calls. That was why two of the biggest dealers in the school hung out there. Rev Dave thought he had them about 95 percent converted, and had no idea why he couldn’t close the deal.

Now, Harris and Tierden were what you might call predictable guys. Wednesday nights they’d hang out at Pongo’s Monkey Burger till sometime after the DQ closed, daring each other to talk dirty to Darla (neither of them ever had the nerve). Then they’d go smoke dope in the Dairy Queen parking lot and crank up Iron Butterfly on the eight-track, till it was time to splash water on the window at McDonald’s. It was a full, busy life, you know? Both of them being all that they could be.

So that Wednesday night, after Paul’s play practice, me and Paul went to New Life together, and Danny and Squid happened to be there. We all decided to split a pool table because it was crowded. So there we all were, being good but troubled youths, basically good kids with just a few problems at home, shooting pool together. You could’ve taken pictures of us for the fund-raising brochure.

The phone rang, and Rebecca behind the counter—Rev Dave’s daughter, in ninth grade, a Madman herself—announced it was for me, handed me the phone, and wound up the two-minute egg timer.

“Hello,” I said, leaning against the wall and cradling the phone like I thought it might be a girlfriend.

“Hey,” Darla said. “Two assholes just left me a fifteen-cent tip after tying up a table for three hours sharing an order of fries. Do you think anyone would like to beat the shit out of them?”

“I’ll ask Rev Dave,” I said, “but it would be better if you asked him yourself.”

“Tell the Reverend I’ll give him a blow job if he breaks Tierden’s nose.”

That bit was off script. I had a hell of a time not laughing like a crazy bastard. “I think he’ll have some kind of answer but it would be better if you came down yourself.”

“Yeah. Hey, tell Danny and Squid I want all the details.”

“Everyone’s coming to work with me, after,” I said, “so you can catch up with us there if you want.”

“Cool. Good luck. Say something about Rev Dave one more time.”

“Like I said,” I said, “I think it would be better if you talked to Rev Dave yourself.”

The egg timer went off just as I handed the phone back to Rebecca.

Now, Rev Dave thought he was the last of the hot-ass arguers, and kept all these cartoon pamphlets in his office behind the counter, ready to go in case anyone wanted to argue. So when he heard me say “I’ll ask Rev Dave,” he was already gwomming his holy diapies for a chance to argue some Jesus into a youth, but coming out of his office acting all casual, like he just happened to be there.

I said I had this friend, Paul and me wanted her to come down to New Life with us, Danny and Squid had asked, too, stuff like that, making it real clear that this was a lost friend with big problems, a messed-up young sinner fit to make a youth minister salivate uncontrollably, who said she wasn’t going to come in because God was bullshit. “See, Rev, every now and then she calls me because she thinks up some stupid question, like the one about God making a rock so big he can’t lift it. It’s just her excuse to not come in and give it a try.”

“Oh, and what was your friend’s question tonight?” Rev Dave asked, stroking his little beatnik beard like he was flexing before stepping into the ring.

“It’s so stupid it’s embarrassing.”

“There are no stupid questions.”

Only stupid people
, I thought, but said, “Well, I think it’s even dumber than the one about the rock. She asked why God lets there be all this pain, and suffering, and war and death and shi—um,
stuff
—in the world, since he could stop it, and if he has the power to stop it, doesn’t that make him responsible for it?”

“Well,” Rev Dave said, “that’s not really a dumb question at all. That’s a very
important
question.” He settled his rimless glasses high on his nose.

Paul drifted over from the pool table, like he was interested, and pretty soon Rev Dave had warmed into the subject and there we were, him talking to Paul and me in his office, with the Rev pushing a lot of cartoon books across the table at us and earnestly explaining how this was called “The Problem of Pain” and it was very-very-
ver
y im
por
tant to
Chris
tians. Darla’s boyfriend at the time, who was majoring in religious studies, had really come up with a perfect one to get Rev Dave going. Paul and me started to wonder whether the Rev would ever stop. He had
three
pamphlets on the subject, so you could tell it was important. And we went over all of them in detail.

Squid and Danny said later that we had the hard part of the job and they had all the fun. With Rev Dave’s back to the door, Rebecca gave Danny and Squid the high sign; they were out the door in zero flat, ran two blocks to the back of the Dairy Queen parking lot, sneaked up behind Bobby Harris’s rolling rust pile, and used a little added touch that Squid thought of—they each turned on a flashlight and shined it in the window on their side, and Danny yelled, “Out of the car, long hair!” just like Kenny Loggins in that song.

So Harris and Tierden opened their doors, already pissing down their legs because they were pretty far into a bowl and thought they were busted. Squid got Tierden by his long dirty hair (“felt like washing my hands for a week afterward,” he said). Danny grabbed Harris by the boy-boobs, right through his shirt, and lifted him off the ground.

They body-slammed those two assholes up against the car to take the breath out of them, and then just hit them till they were both crying and all curled up with their hands around their faces. Later that night, at McDonald’s, Squid said Tierden’s ribs thudded like a bass drum; Danny did a pretty good imitation of Bobby Harris keening “no-o-o-o” as his head got slapped back and forth.

Squid and Danny worked fast but they made sure they hit about every surface there was to hit on those assholes. Then they pantsed them both, pants and shoes and underwear and all, dragged them over to the freezing-cold ditch that runs by there, and pushed them in. Squid said they were crying real hard and hanging on to each other like a couple of homos.

Then Squid stood guard to keep them standing there in that icy water up to their waists, and Danny took their pants and stuff and sprinted up to a streetlight up on Courthouse Street where lots of cars go by. He dropped the pile there and then him and Squid took off, running back to New Life. The way Squid put it, they had explained “don’t be an asshole” in terms anyone could understand. Even Harris and Tierden.

 

 

“Wow,” Marti said, “that was doing the
job
. So how many demerits was that, sixty-two million?”

I swallowed some coffee let my big smile build the effect. “Not even one.”

“Those guys must’ve narked, though, they’re such
losers
—”

“Of course they narked. Now we’re getting to the beautiful part. See, Danny and Squid had only been gone for like ten minutes, so they came back to the pay phone just outside the door of New Life, called, and asked for me. I pretended I was getting another call from my friend who was all messed up and hung up on the problem of pain, and Rev Dave started trying to get onto the phone with ‘her’ over my shoulder.

“Meanwhile Paul dashed around, opened the side door, and he and Squid and Danny cruised back in. Then my ‘friend on the phone’ turned out to be mad at me and hung up, and the three guys acted like they wanted to get another game of pool going, and when I called my nonexistent friend back—Darla’s house, just in case Rev Dave got nosy—she wouldn’t answer.”

“Nonexistent friends can be like that.”

“You bet. I won’t date imaginary people anymore. My friend Larry keeps losing his virginity to them and it never works out.”

“Larry in math class? Okay, that’s another story I have to hear—”

“Oh, you will. Have faith in Larry. Anyway, meanwhile, back at the story I
was
telling, I apologized to Rev Dave, and us four guys shot pool for another hour and went home. Next day in school, Harris and Tierden turned up looking like raccoons and walking like old men. So of course, being pussies—”

“Pick a better word.”

“Uh, so, being wimps, they went to Emerson, the vice principal, and narked out Danny and Squid.”

 

 

Danny and Squid, of course, said they had an alibi, so Emerson called me and Paul in.

He made this big show out of asking us before we saw Danny and Squid, and not telling us what all the questions were about. Of course me and Paul just said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we shot pool with Danny and Squid—or Daniel and Esquibel, trying to sound super-sincere for the adults—all night at New Life. And of course we hung out and rapped about that groovy Bible thing with Rev Dave.

I mean, it was
true
except for about ten minutes out of four hours. Do the math, that works out to ninety-four percent true, that’s an A in truthfulness anywhere.

Emerson got the weirdest smile, and called New Life.

Rev Dave checked his check-in book and found that all four of us had had Pool Table A for an hour and a half before, and an hour after, Harris and Tierden said Danny and Squid beat them up. Rev Dave even added that he especially remembered us because we’d really rapped seriously about some heavy issues, and he thought he might have turned us on to the Book, and that we were really a bunch of far-out kids.

You really had to be there to see Emerson repeating, into the phone, in that flat vice principal voice, “Yes, Reverend, yes, I got that,” and writing down “turned on to the Book” and “far-out kids” on his yellow legal pad. We could hear Rev Dave’s voice through Emerson’s head because of all the enthusiasm the Rev had.

Now here’s the real good part—Emerson knew perfectly well we were bullshitting him. But remember Mrs. Emerson was the cheerleading advisor, and she’d spent a lot of time taking care of Cheryl, who was one of her pets.

In fact Mrs. Emerson had given those assholes so many demerits for hassling Cheryl that Mrs. Brean stopped taking demerits from her about them—Brean is buddies with Bobby Harris’s mother and she came up with some crap about how it’s not fair to report every single time someone does something, and how Mrs. Emerson was just being mean to poor Bobby and Scott and out to get them. Which, I mean,
shouldn’t
a teacher be out to get kids like that? You know, like wolves killing the weak and the sick for the good of the species?

Anyway, Emerson wasn’t totally stupid, despite all appearances. He knew that alibi was way too good. He knew that the Madmen look out for each other and that Cheryl was a Madman. For that matter he knew Harris and Tierden weren’t smart enough to make a story like that up and nobody could be dumb enough to mistake someone else for Squid and Danny.

I mean, trust it, Emerson knew the truth.

But we had set it up so he could
pretend
he believed us. That’s why he got that beautiful big weird smile, and he was still smirking up a smirk-storm when he gave Harris and Tierden three-day suspensions for making a false complaint, staggered so they wouldn’t have each other to hang out with.

I shrugged and gestured at the now-dry window. “Anyway, like a week after that, Bobby Harris figured out ‘wa ter go splash, Karl have to work more.’ They’re so proud of that. And they do other petty nasty shit, sometimes, too, to Paul, but they sure leave Cheryl alone. The weirdest thing is now they try to make out like they didn’t get hurt or it was all their idea or something. Like they think we played a really funny joke on them, you know?
So
weird. Like they’ll come over to Paul and me, or Danny and Squid, at Pietro’s Pizza and tease us about it like it was something that
we’d
be sensitive about. Danny says if he has to do it again he’s going to make them kiss each other and take Polaroids and tape those up around the school.”

She laughed. “So that’s what the Madmen do? Protect each other like that?”

“No. I wish it was. Usually we can’t do a fucking thing for each other, come to admit it. We’re a little group of mental-case high school students, not the fuckin’ X-Men, you know? But we know each others’ stories, and we do try to watch each other’s backs, when we can.”

“And now I’m in the club.”

“Unless you ask Gratz to help you stay out of it, or nobody gives you your ticket. Listen, I have to hang around till time to clock out. That’s like another hour. Usually I’d do homework, but I got that done earlier, so I was going to just sit and read; don’t let me keep you if you need to get home.”

“I need
not
to get home, since our moms are out drinking together. I don’t know about yours, but when mine gets home, it’s going to get real ugly.”

“Hang out as long as you like. The book isn’t
that
good. You got a story?”

“Not really. Or just one and it’s really long and pointless and I hate it. Will you pretend to listen and sympathize?”

I leaned back and settled in with some cold fries and a little thing of ketchup on my lap. “Pretending to listen and sympathize is my fucking specialty.”

 

 

Marti had lived a lot of weird places, New Mexico and Washington State and Nevada, usually far away from people, because her dad’s work was with “all this wild dangerous atomic shit. And wherever they have a cluster of real smart guys, way out in the desert, they have a genius school, because smart people have smart kids, and I got shipped from one genius school to another, over and over, because Dad has no patience, so as soon as I got nongenius scores, he’d move me again.”