Alter Boys (23 page)

The whistle tooted yet again.  A long last plea of sympathy for the awkward loner.  No one honored the command.  The last partner remained unclaimed.

Greaser could bear no more.  He skated into traffic, alone, and hurried to the no skate area in front of the bathrooms.  He hit the carpeting hard, banged into the boy’s room door and clattered inside.

Sanctuary.

More out of need for maintaining balance than by intent, Greaser clung to the porcelain sink and stared at his face, reflected by the polished sheet metal plate that served as the boy’s room mirror.  He search for answers; they arrived in the form of voices:

“Look out for the oil slick!”  Doug Hennesy
.

“Too late.  I’m trapped in the spill!”  Varsity quarterback Brad Anderson
.

“What dija ‘xpect.  The thing was covered with grease.
  Thanks a lot Greaser!
” 
Grant
Dohmeier
.

“Greaser!  There’s grease coming off of your skates!”  Some kid
.

“Eeeew!  No!  Gross!  I’m not touching that Greaser’s hair!”  Sue
Hespen
.

Recognition unfolded in the memory of that final voice.   ‘Hair.’  ‘Greas
er.’  ‘I’m not touching that---G
reaser
’
s---
hair
.’  Before the play; Sue
Hespen
had said that.  And then Ms. Bagner had washed his hair.

‘My hair,’ Greaser observed.  ‘It looks different.’   Even in the tinny reflection of the sheet metal, the less-than-casual relationship with soap and water was plainly evident.  Greaser looked at himself as if for the first time.  He had never had use for mirrors before.  He was just…well, he was what he was. 

He thought of the kids on the skate floor and his classmates at school.  No, none of them had hair that looked like this.  That’s why they called him Greaser.  He needed to wash it.

His self revelation should have been gratifying.  If not for his past reputation; abhorring.

2

Unwilling to be subjected to anymore taunts, yet perfectly willing to commit the sin of leaving early, Greaser exchanged his skates for his shoes, mounted his bike and rode furiously toward home.

He took back streets to stay out of sight as much as possible.  Whenever a car drove by he hunched and turned away.  The conspicuous feeling made him pump the pedals harder, moving ever faster in his quest to wash himself of his stigma.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me.’  His thoughts went first, not to his parents, but to the influential people in his life, his classmates and teachers.  He thought of Craig Thompson offering him a dollop of shampoo in gym class with no more than a single word: 
“Here.”  And Ms. Bagner, washing his hair for him but not telling him ‘this is something you need to do
every day
.’

Yes, they had tried to help, but he could not view their help with gratitude.  Why hadn’t they done just a little bit more. 

Home.

He threw his bike down in the front yard and looked at the house.  It had a different look about it.  But that had to wait.  Right now he needed to get inside, away from the staring eyes of the neighbors, away from the… “Hey Greaser!  Why aren’t you skating?”...silent voices that tormented his ears.

Inside, the TV was on and his mother was clanging cookery in the kitchen.  For the first time he could ever remember, Greaser ignored the television and headed to another part of the house.  The bathroom.

The metallic Roller Rink mirror had been a revelation.  The glass bathroom mirror (albeit streaked and dirty) was a harsh affirmation.

Greaser saw with anguishing clarity the bane by which he had earned his moniker.  Black clotted strips draped limp from his scalp to his eyebrows.  His hair lay flat, filthy and ugly. 

But it was more than just his hair.  Glistening pools of oil and flecks of white skin and pus ran along the sides of his nose and cheeks.  Another moment of clarity, and Greaser bared his lips; revealing the most unsavory of grins.  His teeth were as yellow as corn nuggets and covered with growth that could have easily been mistaken for fur.

The recognition of the vile appearance of his teeth pushed him over the edge.  Painful emotions: confusion, uncertainty, shame and humiliation flooded to the surface from deep within.  The feelings were just the top layer of scum that floated on a vast pool of foul blackness.  Deeper, much, much deeper were buried
complex mutant creatures of torment.  Spindly monsters of unspeakable terror had witnessed the escape of their baby brother emotions.  They crashed against their cages, desperate to be exhumed to inflict torture on their captor.    

The tears fell hard.  Silent, but hard. 

He gripped the basin with one hand and with the other he rapped his knuckles on the porcelain.  An act that he was personally unfamiliar with, other than for the television characters he had seen using the technique to deal with their emotions.

“Why?!”  The question ran through his mind but not his lips.  ‘Why didn’t they tell me?!’

Greaser crammed his unresolved feelings back into their hiding place and willed himself to stop crying. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he had brushed his teeth, or even owned a toothbrush for that matter.  But that would have to wait.  Right now he needed to do something about his hair.

While the front of the bathroom mirror held grief, the back of the
mirror held redemption.  Here G
reaser found a nearly full bottle of shampoo.  Based upon the way the bottle had to be cracked out of the crystallized scrim that had fused it to the shelf, the product had not seen use for a very, very long time. 

A similar crack occurred as G
reaser untwisted the cap and placed in on the basin.

First:  water.

No. 

First, the door.

For fifteen years he had performed every private function in this room in not so private fashion.  Now things were different.  The
act of washing his filthy hair, in this house, in this bathroom, while leaving the door open, would be on par with stripping naked for the glee club.  But it came with a risk.  Closing the door might raise suspicions.  ‘What are you doing in there!  Find strength in the lord you dirty Corky, Georgie,
Porgie
, Greaser girl!’

The prospect of his manic mother seeing him washing his hair felt vastly obscene.  The consequence of her questioning his privacy could be dealt with.  That, or ignored.

He closed the door.  And then locked it.

Now the water.

Greaser recalled the process Ms. Bagner had employed and ducked his head under the unsteady stream of water coming from the faucet. 

Next came the shampoo, far too much in his inexperienced hands, but for this job, more was better.  He pushed the glob around on his head, tentatively at first, and then with ever increasing force.  “Look out for the oil slick!”  He dug harder at his scalp.  “There’s grease coming off of your skates!”  A hitch came up in his throat and he fought back the tears.  “Eeeew!  No!  Gross!  I’m not touching that Greaser’s hair!”  He clawed manically at his head as if by scraping away the sludge he could also scrape away the voices.

Greaser lifted his eyes and volumes of foam sluiced off his head and plopped into the sink.  In his mind he heard the offending voice of his mother:  ‘So wasteful!  Vanity thy name is Georgie
Porgie
girl!’ 

Enough.  He had to get this stuff off and down the drain.

Greaser ducked under the water for what he thought would be long enough; all of ten seconds, and risked a glance in the mirror.  He looked absurd.  Except for the barren strip of black, where the
rinse water had been concentrated on the front of his forehead, swirls and spikes of froth still covered his noggin.  

He felt he had made a horrible mistake.  He had looked bad before, but now he looked ludicrous. 

More water.  He needed more water.

Greaser lowered his head again and this time cupped his hands to direct the water to the sides and back of his head.  Over and over he rinsed, not daring to risk another look in the mirror until all of the telltale shampoo was gone.   

As he cupped and rinsed, he watched the drippings in the sink become less foamy and more liquid.  He ran his hands through his hair again one last time and was relieved to see no lingering bubbles.  Finally, he raised and looked.  The foam was gone. He hadn’t expected miracles, but he did expect more than what he saw.  His hair didn’t look a bit different than before.  The sheen of grease had simply been replaced with the sheen of water. 

There was no towel, but a crumpled washrag lay on the back
of the toilet tank.  With this G
reaser was able to ring out most of the water until the rag was saturated.

He dared another look in the mirror. 

At school, Sue
Hespen
had dried his hair with a comb and a hair dryer.  He didn’t think that they owned a hair dryer but he was pretty sure he had once seen a comb.   The assumption was correct and he found the modest black comb in the medicine cabinet behind his father
’
s s
h
aving gear.

A healthy debate could have been waged over which teeth were filthier, the teeth in Greaser
’
s mouth or those in the co
mb.  It mattered not, G
reaser dragged the clotted preening tool through his wet head.  Another look in the mirror, and this time it was better, at least there was now some symmetry to the project.  Perhaps when it dried… well, that remained to be seen.

With the washcloth he also scrubbed away at the oil pools of his face, an incomplete, amateur job to be sure, but definitely an improvement.  For his teeth he had no immediate answer, but it was Saturday and it was still early.  He could bike over to the Red Owl grocery store.  He knew exactly what he would buy.  Not ordinary toothpaste, but Pearl Drops Tooth Polish “For whiter, brighter teeth.”  That; and a tooth brush.   

The whole process of hair and face took
no more than ten minutes, but G
reaser stood longer, staring in the mirror, willing himself to look different, to be different.  He began to connect with his own inner ego, but only on the most cursory of levels.  A heavy mesh screen filtered his thoughts and memories, allowing only the most benign to find their way through.  His glimpse into his own being was fleeting, and then the mesh began to congeal into a solid wall.  Emotions and memories that were not to be allowed to escape,
ever
, were again pushed back into the blackness.

The few minutes of self realization were enlightening.  Then Greaser startled in brief panic.  How long had he been in here?  He had finished his duty and the door was still closed.  And locked!  That would raise even more suspicions.

He looked at the shampoo and washrag which still sat on the basin.  Should he leave them out to provide evidence should anyone question what he had been doing in the bathroom?  Or should he put them away to prevent any questions about what he had been doing in the bathroom.

Postponing the decision, he turned and unlocked, then opened the door.

From the kitchen he could hear his mother still obliviously clanging the cookware.  A good sign.  Very likely she hadn’t noticed at all that her son had been stowed up in the bathroom for the past 20 minutes. 

In fact, she wasn’t even aware that he had come home at all.     

Greaser acted.

He re-capped the shampoo bottle and parked it back in the medicine cabinet; fitting it into its original spot, a job made easier by the crusted outline of shampoo that lined the shelf.  The washrag he tossed back on the toilet tank.  It wasn’t right.  He then took pains to mold it into its original crumpled shape as best as he could remember.