Palo Alto: Stories (11 page)

While I was reading this to Fred, sometimes my gaze
would catch a picture on the far wall. It was an image from
In the Night Kitchen
. Those three laughing bakers had such fat faces. Heavy-hanging cheeks and bulbous noses like genitals. I didn’t want to look, but the picture kept grabbing my eye. Fred lay there with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He was higher than I was.

At the end of the book the rainbow vows to never touch the earth again.

“That shit was stupid. That was your favorite book?”

“Yes.”

“Faggot,” said Fred. He didn’t open his eyes.

I looked up and saw those bakers again. They were cooking up the naked boy in a pie. I was happy there with Fred.

“Those fucking goblins were gay!” he said.

“Not so loud,” I told him.

Fred didn’t open his eyes. “They
suck
the juice out of rainbows? Rainbows stand for
faggots
.”

“Shut up, Fred.”

“What? They’re
gay
! Rainbows are
gay
!” His eyes were a little open now.

“So?” I said.

“So, don’t get all worked up over it. It’s just a fact, you and the Rainbow Goblins are
gay
.”

“Shut the fuck up, Fred,” I said.

“What? They’re a bunch of dudes, and they all hang out all the time. That’s all they
did,
hang out together. All those dudes.”

“So?” I said.

“And they lived together in a cave.”

“So?”

“All in a cave! Gay!
Dirty
and gay,” said Fred. As if he was the cleanest guy.

“Great fucking point, Fred. I mean, what children’s book character
isn’t
gay?”

Fred didn’t answer. Then he said, “A lot of them.”

“Cat in the Hat?” I said. “Gay. The Grinch? Gay. Hungry Caterpillar? He turns into a butterfly, gay!” Now Fred was thinking about it. I continued, “The Runaway Bunny, the bunny in
Goodnight Moon,
the Velveteen Rabbit,
Peter
Rabbit, all gay. All rabbits are gay.”

“No.”

“They’re sensitive, but different, but also like boys, but then also not.”

He thought, and then said, “Yeah, I guess they are.”

“The little boy who flies around
naked
in
Night Kitchen,
and Max from
Where the Wild Things Are,
gay!”

“Bullshit, Max isn’t gay.”

“Bull true, he dresses up in his little white wolf suit, so gay. And then he tells his mom to fuck off…”

“That’s not gay…”

“. . . and then he goes to an island and hangs around with a bunch of monsters who party with him all night, dancing and parading him around on their backs.”

“That’s so weird, but I think it’s kind of true,” said Fred.

“All little-kids’ stories have to be like that. They have to be all soft and gay, so that the moms are okay with it.”

Fred sat there, and then he said, “
I
want a wolf suit.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“I can’t think of anything sexier than a skintight, furry
wolf suit,” said Fred. He was really laughing a lot, almost too loud. Those three bakers looked like they were laughing too.

That night I had a dream. There were rainbows everywhere and I was driving all over town in my dad’s busted car, wearing a white wolf suit. The car was making this horrible grinding sound with a whine underneath it. Whenever I hit another car, it just bounced off me and I would cackle.

Two days later, I went into the library to work. The place was empty as usual. I stopped at the front desk. Judy, the brown-haired one, was there.

“I really like it here,” I said.

“We like
you,
Teddy,” she said. “You’re always welcome here, even after everything is over.”

I said thank you and walked toward the back room. Down the hall, Mags, the gray-haired one, came out of the bathroom and slowly made her way toward me. When we passed, I smiled, and she smiled a wrinkled smile and said quietly, “Good boy, good boy.”

Fred didn’t come in. I rediscovered all the Bill Peet books. He usually wrote about animals and drew great pictures. I went through all of them. There was one about a hermit crab called Kermit the Hermit who hoarded all his stuff, and one about clumsy circus lions, and another about a little mountain goat with huge horns that he could ski on, and a peacock with a scary face patterned into his plume, and a pig with the map of the world on its side, and this clumsy beast that was part rhino, part giraffe, elephant, camel, zebra with reindeer horns called a Whingdingdilly. And there was this one about a dopey sea serpent named Cyrus that terrorized galleons.
It was good to read those books again; all the feelings came back to me.

Part II
Wasting

Things got bad at the Children’s Library. I started taking the books home without checking them out and then not returning them. Sometimes Fred and I would get high and draw dicks and pussies on the animals in the books and then put them back on the shelves. One time I was in the Secret Garden and I tried to carve
APRIL
into the bench, but I didn’t finish because one of the librarians came out, so the carving just said
APRI,
but the
R
was a little unfinished and the
I
was really light.

Then one day after school, my mom told me my probation officer wanted me to call her. I called from the kitchen phone while my mom washed vegetables in the sink. As the phone rang I watched my mother with the vegetables and I realized what a small woman she was.

“Hi, Janice,” I said into the phone.

“Teddy, I’m gonna need you to come to my office on Tuesday after school.”

“That’s the day I go to the Children’s Library.”

“You’re not going there anymore and you know it.”

“What do you mean? I love that place,” I said, and my mother looked over.

“Well, you screwed it up,” she said. “I’ll see you at three twenty on Tuesday. Don’t be late, and you better not
drive
here.”

My mother was holding half a green pepper. She looked so sad. The water ran in the sink.

On Tuesday, during first period auto class, Barry Chambers and Bill and I went out to the train tracks to try some of the weed that Barry had been growing in his backyard, on top of the shed. We walked down the tracks a little and stood near the Bat Cave. No Goth kids or anyone else was around. Barry had the stuff rolled in Saran Wrap. He unrolled it and there were two thick, glistening buds. Barry broke off enough for a bowl and filled his smooth porcelain rainbow pipe. The stuff was strong. When I coughed, Barry said, “See, I got the good shit.” Bill took some and he coughed too.

“How’d you grow that?” said Bill.

“I just ordered the seeds from Amsterdam and followed instructions,” Barry said. Barry was Mormon and cuddly like a sea lion and Bill was half Mexican and dumb.

After we smoked we sat on the rail of the tracks. The graf
fiti on the cement wall of the Bat Cave looked good.
ORFN
was up, and
MSTK
, and
REVERS
, written backward, and the best was
LUST
. With my eyes I kept tracing the way the letters flowed into each other. They were so well done I could taste them like chewy candy.

“What’s up with you and April?” I asked Barry.

“April is crazy, but we’re gonna fuck.”

Bill had been quiet the whole time, but he said, “Yeah,
fuck
that shit.” I guess he meant April was the shit and Barry should fuck her. His eye whites were pink and the veins were apparent. He was yukking.

I stood up and went to the wall. I had a black Sharpie in my pocket and I wrote
SHIT FUCK COCK SUCK DIE ASS NOTHINGNESS MEANINGLESS CRY
. My writing went a little over
LUST,
but he was big and in red spray paint.

“What does all that mean?” said Barry.

“Nothing,” I said, but it was something. Barry let us use his Visine and then we went back and made it before the end of auto class. I banged on the side of an engine with a hammer and then I sat in a metal chair. In English, I looked at a book but the words didn’t separate; all the letters were ants marching into the crease.

After school, the weed was wearing off and I walked with Fred toward the court building where Janice had her office. It was near California Avenue, so we just walked down El Camino. Fred had been doing crazy things lately. Stupid things, like throwing rocks through house windows at night, and then running.

“Can you believe that Barry is gonna fuck April?” I said.

“No,” Fred said. Fred had never fucked, and I had only once. It was with Shauna. Everyone called her Dog Bite Shauna because a dog had bitten her and there were two horizontal scar lines on the left side of her face. We did it at a party, and when I was finally on top of her I closed my eyes because her face was so close. We kissed while we did it and I remember being surprised because I was holding her face and I couldn’t feel the scars, but when I opened my eyes they were there.

“
Barry?
I mean why Barry?”

“I don’t know, cuz he’s a fucker,” said Fred. “And he’s nice.”

“But
Barry
? He’s, like, chubby and he’s
Mormon
and… I mean, I don’t think he’s ever fucked before. Why does she like him?” We thought while we walked.

“He plays drums,” said Fred.

“Whatever,” I said, and we walked in silence. On a public mailbox I drew a face with my Sharpie. It was a mournful face, and next to it I wrote,

At California Avenue, Fred went into the café at the Printer’s Ink bookstore to get coffee and I walked on to the court building. It was three thirty already.

I went to the seventh floor and checked in and then waited in a wooden chair for Janice. I wasn’t high anymore but I was so tired I kept my backpack on when I sat. I was slumped to the side of the chair when she came out.

“Okay, Teddy.” I stood up. “Nice shirt,” she said. I had a red plaid shirt on and the pocket was ripped so it hung funny. She was fat, and wearing tan pants. When she turned, her ass was this huge ugly thing that was wide and flattened from sitting. In her office, I took my bag off and sat in the heavy wooden chair across the desk from her.

“So,” she said, and then was very still. Her face was like her ass, flat and wide. Her cheeks stuck out farther than her temples and they hung like the jowls of a Saint Bernard. Her skin was oily and olive-colored with splotches of red around her nose.

I didn’t say anything. The walls were beige and the ceiling had those white squares with little holes in them. It was the most boring place I had ever been. Finally she asked me if I was high and I said I wasn’t and she said she could test me if she wanted to and I told her that would be okay, but she didn’t say anything more about it. Then she said, “You drew a dick on the Runaway Bunny?”

“No, that was Fred,” I said.

She asked who Fred was but I didn’t answer. “Did you have friends visit you while you were doing community service at the Children’s Library?”

“No, no one came, it was
me
. I’m sorry I drew the dick on the Runaway Bunny, and the vagina on the mom bunny. It was really stupid, I’ll pay for the book.”

“Yes, you will, of course you will, but you’re not doing the rest of your hours there. The librarians don’t want you there anymore.”

“They like me.”

“No, they don’t. You’re lazy and you carved ‘ape’ into their bench outside.”

I started laughing. It seemed really funny at the time so I kept laughing. Maybe I was still high. “I didn’t write ‘ape,’ I wrote ‘apri.’”

“What the hell is ‘apri’?”

“Nothing, just some shit.”

“Well, you’re paying for that too,” Janice said. I said okay, and she asked what kind of asshole I was, defacing libraries. I said I didn’t know. Then she handed me a list of places where I could finish my community service hours. I had thirty-two hours left. I could work at Goodwill, I could clean up graffiti, I could work at Planned Parenthood.

“Goodwill sounds okay,” I said. She was looking at her own copy of the list.

“No, actually you don’t get to choose,” she said. “You’re working at Sycamore Towers.” Sycamore Towers was a nursing home. My great-grandfather had been there before he died at Stanford Hospital. I used to visit when I was about three and he’d always give me chalky candies. “Great-grandpa candies,” we called them. There is a photograph of him and me shaking hands in the doorway to his room: he is tall, in a gray suit, with white hair; and I’m in a diaper, standing on my toes to reach his hand.

I started working at Sycamore Towers. It had fourteen floors; I worked on the twelfth. There was a desk station for the orderlies in the center of the floor, and from there the four wings extended out in each direction, so the place was shaped like a crooked cross. Each wing held eleven rooms for
the residents: five on one side of the hall and six on the other. Near the orderlies’ station there was a community room where the old people worked on crafts, and across the hall there was a TV room.

Most of the old people were in wheelchairs and they didn’t move much. They usually sat dispersed about the four halls doing nothing. There were also some that lay in bed all day and had bedpans. Except for the meals and craft time, the old people were left to themselves. Some watched TV in the TV room and a few read, but most stared at nothing.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d walk to the Towers after school. I’d get there around three thirty because it wasn’t very far, over near University Avenue. When I arrived at the Towers the old people would be having their craft time in the community room. I would sit with them and make sure they had their beads and crayons, and if anyone needed water I would get it. They would do crafts for an hour and then they were free until dinner at six. I would push them around in their chairs and clean up after them and get supplies from the storage room for the orderlies.