The Glass Cafe
Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to Wanda.
FOREWORD
W
hich I at first thought was spelled Forward because it was in the beginning or forward part of the book but which the editor corrected. It's the first words, or the forewords. The editor also corrected some other
things I did wrong in the story, spelling things
that my mother, Al, said were sloppy on my part.
And tried to make me tone things down because
they said it was unbelievable but I wouldn't beCause the story is all true and happened to me
and is mine. And of Course Al's. And Miles' and
Waylon's and the biker's and don't forget the
state's. I mean, like I said in the title.
Thank you,
Your friend,
Tony
CHAPTER ONE
S
o you know my name is Tony and I am twelve and my mother who is named Alice except nobody calls her that, they all call her Al, like she was a guy only she isn't, is a stripper, only it's called exotic dancing, at a club called the Kitty Kat, except that everybody calls it the Zoo on account of an animal act they used to have but don't anymore because the humane society said it was wrong to use snakes out of their “natural element” although Muriel, who danced with a seven-foot boa named Steve, swore that the snake slept through the whole dance except I know Steve who lives in the dressing room in a glass case and I can't tell if he's sleeping or not because he never closes his eyes.
This is what I like.
I like double bacon cheeseburgers and vanilla shakes.
I like school where I get pretty good grades in everything except gym and sometimes math when it doesn't make any sense to me like when we have to figure out two trains traveling at different speeds and which one will get to a place called Parkerville first. There is never a place called Parkerville in real life and hardly any trains go anywhere anymore and why would two trains be trying to get to a place called Parkerville in the first place? It's just silly.
I like Melissa Davidson who is twelve and has short hair and sparks and crackles when she gets mad. A lot. I mean I like her a lot.
I like art and always carry a sketch pad and a couple of soft pencils and draw every chance I get, which is really how the trouble started but I'll talk more about that later after I do what Ms. Providge the English teacher calls “developing the structure and character” of the story. This story. This story about my life.
I like dogs except that I'm not supposed to have one because the apartment we live in won't allow pets which doesn't seem right because they allow a biker and his woman to live there and a dog is a lot cleaner than a biker. Or at least this biker, who is named Short Man and is so dumb he tried to drink gasoline one day just because it was in a beer bottle and he spit it out on a lit barbecue grill and there were barbecued chicken parts all over the apartment compound and I heard he didn't have a hair left on his head. I know plenty of dogs smarter than that. So I keep trying on the dog thing, doing what Al calls pushing the envelope by bringing them to visit sometimes. Or to be honest every chance I get.
I like Corvettes. I know it's not cool to like them as much as foreign cars but I read the car magazines in the drugstore owned by Foo Won on the corner when he doesn't catch me. Corvettes, it said in one article I read, are a Greatly Underestimated Force to be Reckoned with in the Muscle Car Arena. Of course I don't have a Corvette but Al said if I want one bad enough and work hard enough I can have one someday when I'm old enough to drive. I would like to have a good car for the muscle car arena.
I like baseball and my favorite team changes some because it started with the Braves and then went to the Padres and then the Yankees and now I'm back to the Braves but I'm definitely leaning back toward the Padres.
I do not like skateboards, or I should say I guess I like them but I don't skateboard anymore because I tried it once without a helmet and hit the concrete so hard I saw flashes of color from one Wednesday to Friday in the next week. I didn't dare to tell Al because she would have taken me to the doctor which she does even if I'm a little sick and not seeing flashes of colors in my head.
I like bicycling. I have an old clunker Schwinn five-speed that looks so bad nobody will steal it except that I took it all apart and the bearings and all the internal parts are slick and new.
I like Coke, not the kind you snort up your nose like Magdalene did until Al got her into treatment and she has two years and two months straight now but the kind you drink from a bottle and I put peanuts in the bottle and drink the Coke and eat the peanuts.
I like Fiji. That's an island country in the South Pacific and I read all about it in a travel magazine at Foo Won's store. I'll go there someday when I am (a) an adult, (b) successful and (c) have a Corvette and maybe (d) married to Melissa which is all part of the list I have for my Life Plan. I don't want to live in Fiji but just visit there after I am certified on scuba gear and can dive, because the diving is supposed to be absolutely stellar there according to the magazine although I always thought stellar meant something to do with the stars.
I do not like television but I used to like TV until Al said it was sucking the brain out of me and hit the set in just the right place to kill it with a small hammer we use to unstick the kitchen window when it's hot and we want it open because the air conditioner only cools the living room and doesn't blow into the kitchen and now it doesn't work. The TV I mean. It hisses and pops but there's no picture or sound. Then Al made me go with her to the library and I got dozens of books even though I didn't read much then but do now and twice a week we have literary discussion evenings about books we have both read that week. We never had television discussion evenings twice a week when I watched TV and now I don't like it anymore. TV I mean. And I don't watch it at all even when I'm visiting Waylon who is my best outside friend and who is twelve and who has television and is maybe even a tube head and also does not have television or literary discussion evenings twice a week in his home. I think mostly because Waylon says his folks both work hard and are never really home. But Al works hard too, and is home almost all the time when she isn't working.
I like Waylon outside. Inside he mostly just sits around and talks about what he wants to do outside but outside he's great on a bike when we want to ride the four miles down to the beach and watch the ocean or the beach freaks or the jugglers or the beach dogs working their Frisbees or taking balls out of the surf and we eat those rubbery hot dogs in limp buns which only taste good at the beach and I can never tell Al I ate because she says they're made out of sheep's eyeballs and testicles and petroleum byproducts and will make my liver rot before I'm sixteen which she says is a very bad age to have a rotten liver. Waylon is the best friend for all that and one inside thing too, the computer. Waylon is very good with a computer and sometimes we'll sit in my house and work the Net. Al, who says the computer is good but not all parts of the Net are good, limits me to one hour a day on the Net and if I do more or if she catches me looking for porno sites she says she will take the little hammer we use on the kitchen window and tap the computer in just the right place to kill it. She likes that hammer and talked once about using it on the biker when he said something snotty I didn't catch as we walked by but he must have believed her because he's been nice ever since.
And I like Al. I mean I know you're supposed to like your mother or love your mother but I mean I like Al who never wants me to call her Mother or Mom or Ma but just Al like a friend, a best friend, better than Waylon even outside and Al is good both outside and inside and sometimes when it's the worst day of my whole life and maybe Melissa is talking about somebody else or math is kicking my butt or I have a cold and the smog is making it worse Al can just laugh, a deep laugh that comes from way inside and I can't help but smile and think of something good. Which makes what happened because of the drawings really, really stupid.
CHAPTER TWO
T
he thing is right about here if we followed Ms. Providge's rules for English we would probably move on to the plot, where the characters have what she calls “conflict,” and we would work through the “conflict” to some “form of resolution.”
And I would like to do that, I really would except that I think it would leave out the most important thing which is that if we jump right to the conflict part where we try for a resolution you would miss most of my life which is really maybe the most important part because that's the part the state just couldn't understand and was why Al got mad and made them mad and that brought in the cops which freaked out the biker who became a one-man “armed camp” according to the
Los Angeles Times
which made a SWAT team Respond and React which destroyed a perfectly good door belonging to Juan Gomez who was only a little bit illegal involving the immigration aspect of life.
But all that's for later when we get to the part about conflict and plot resolution.
For now I think I should maybe talk about my day. On school days I get up at seven o'clock and Al gets up and we have pancakes. Every school morning. Al is there every morning when I go to school and every afternoon when I come home. Sometimes in the mornings she's a little slow waking up because she works so late. We make pancakes from a mix and I have three cakes and she has one because, as she says, her figure is important to our livelihood, with light maple syrup except they call it “Lite Surrupp” on the bottle which is just wrong, just plain wrong even if they're trying to be cute. Then I sip a juice while she drinks a cup of coffee, black of course because of calories which she thinks of as a kind of bug that can kill you, as if calories were hiding there in food to get you and not just a measurement of heat. We talk about school and how I can improve my math grades and she gives me money for the day, bus money and lunch money, and I take the bus to school. I have small jobs I do for money but she won't let me spend that on lunch or the bus to school because she says that's her responsibility. It seems like a fuzzy line to me and I think I should pay my way and she says I do just by being a kid and shouldn't have to worry about other things and I say that's all right but I'm growing fast and going to be a man someday and should be learning about responsibility myself. She says don't hurry it up it will come soon enough and do I want her to be a grandmother already? I stop arguing then. But I still think I'm right.
I read somewhere that the city doesn't have a good bus system which is why everybody drives all the time which causes all the traffic jams. But the buses are almost always on time and except for a druggie or a jerk now and then there isn't any trouble riding them.
School is like, you know, well, everybody has school so it isn't necessary to get into it too much except to say that there are jocks and jerks and dweebs and geeks and cool people and not cool people and some good teachers and some not so good and the principal is a retired army colonel named Armstrong who at first thought he was still in the army and wanted people to call him Colonel Armstrong, but mellowed out when one morning all the kids stood in formation in the halls and slow-marched one . . . step . . . at . . . a . . . time all in perfect formation from first- to second-period class.
I guess we're about like all middle schools except we have a drama teacher named Miles who gets so intense sometimes he practically faints when he reads Shakespeare and we have to dab his face with damp paper towels and pretend to help him to his desk so he can recover. Miles works really hard and does a lot of small parts on television. Waylon says he sees him all the time in commercials and used car ads and he doesn't need to teach, but he really likes kids. He comes once a week to teach drama in case anybody wants to be an actor and says he faints because Shakespeare is so good he takes his, Miles', breath away. I don't have that trouble with Shakespeare yet but I try to read him a little every week because I figure if he can make Miles who is a professional actor faint there must be something to his work.
School sometimes goes very fast like when art is fun or we get to read in English or when history is about war and sometimes, like when there is a math test, it can take forever. But usually the five days of school seems like maybe only seven or eight days and then a weekend comes.
During the week I have to study and do homework and every night before she goes to work Al sits with me and we go over what I'm supposed to do that night or from the night before if I didn't get it done. She goes to work about seven so she can get ready for the first show which is at eight and she gets home between midnight and one in the morning. I've never been in the club part where she works but have been in the dressing room area and I know most of the girls who work there. I like them and they seem to like me, and I know all their names and most of their measurements because they're on the posters. . . . But more on that later when we talk about how the difficulties started.
On the weekends I have work to do around the apartment complex for Mr. Haver who is the manager and part owner. I get some money for cleaning the sidewalks and raking the little bit of grass at the front and picking up the trash and then there are chores to do at home, like help clean the house and take out the garbage and of course homework. But some of that can be done during the week. So sometimes Al and I will take the Bug which we restored together using magazines from Foo Won's except for the parts that were too tricky for us, even with the magazines to help us, when we had to go to a machine shop for help, and we head off to sit on the beach so Al can read Charles Dickens who she loves or go up along the highway and have a picnic. But sometimes Al has other stuff to do or a date or has to work both Friday and Saturday night and has to rest a bit Sunday so I'll take off with Waylon on our bikes and we go to the movies or out to the mall where I once saw Mel Gibson get out of a plain old Chevy, not even a limo, or maybe it was somebody who looks just like him, and we'll play some video games or look at stuff we can't afford to buy.
Sometimes when I feel brave I'll call Melissa and ask her if she'd like to go to a movie and about one out of four times she'll say yes which is almost worse than when she says no because then I get scared about what to wear and what to say and how to look and comb or not comb my hair or use cologne or not use cologne or aftershave or not aftershave even though I don't shave. I mean I turn into a mess. I dug into the relationship magazines at Foo Won's and decided that while we're friendly we are nowhere near showing PDA (Public Displays of Affection) and we're a very long way from being MIF (Monogamous in Friendship) and may never get to IWA (Intimate When Alone) and we'll definitely have to pick up the pace a great deal before we enter steps A, B, C and D from my plan, which I haven't told Melissa about yet. According to the articles if I did I might drive her away because she might be CS (Commitment Shy) and not even know it. Many are. That's how they say it in the articles. Many are.
Which is an “aside,” as Ms. Providge would put it, and not “germane to the plot” except that it shows me and my “character arc” which I guess is important because it's a story about me. Ms. Providge did not use the words “character arc.” That came from Miles when he was describing a role he had in a commercial where he was a man holding a watermelon in back of a customer at a supermarket checkout stand who was taking
forever
to make out a check instead of using a special shopping card and caused Miles to drop the watermelon which splattered all over the floor and Miles said he had only that to use to develop the “character arc” of the man he was supposed to be portraying, just the moment when the watermelon splattered and Miles said it wasn't dramatic enough to have the impact needed for the impatience and anger involved so I guess, thinking about it, that I will never be an actor because I just don't think in dramatic arcs. Which is another aside but we'll leave it in because it's about Miles and I like Miles and he should be in all of this even though he doesn't become a real point of my character arc until the end when he meets Al and there is this spark thing that happens between Miles and Al that I would like to have happen with Melissa and me only it hasn't. Yet.
We go to movies a lot, Waylon and I, although I'm trying to expand my mind because of Melissa, and Waylon only wants movies where things blow up or get shot. I don't mind that and once in math class as a kind of exercise I thought of all the movies I went to and made a table and found that as a general thing I need three or four movies about things blowing up or somebody getting shot for every movie that I might be able to take Melissa to see which would be a movie about a girl who was never popular in school suddenly finding a way to get popular and be dated by the captain of the football team or her father buys her a Camaro or a Porsche and she saves a dolphin or maybe all of the above, which I think would be an ideal movie for someone like Melissa. I don't mean to sound bitter but sometimes I have a tough time staying awake when I go to a Melissa-type movie and it would be so much easier if a lot of things happened much faster. Like maybe the Camaro, which a lot of people think is hot but which in my opinion is not a particularly good car for the muscle car arena, could blow up. Or maybe the captain of the football team could go insane and shoot at a dolphin or a whale and the boy who wasn't all that popular but who knew a lot about cars because he read all the car magazines at Foo Won's could drive like a true professional muscle car driver and save the dolphin or the whale and the girl would be so grateful she would see the error of her ways and like the guy who wasn't all that popular but was better than the football player who shot dolphins or whales.
That's what Ms. Providge would call a fantasy and not at all germane to the plot but I think Miles would say it applied to my character arc so I'll leave it in.
During the work week the day usually ends with me going to bed and I'm supposed to sleep because Al doesn't get home until late and Mr. and Mrs. Gomez check on me to make sure everything is all right which is all just for Al because I can and do take care of myself but I never go to sleep, not once, until Al comes home although I pretend to be asleep when she comes to my room and checks me and kisses me on the forehead and tucks the covers in because I don't want her to worry and that is the way my day ends.
Except of course until everything went to pieces.