Rats Saw God (8 page)

“I think it's sweet,” Missy said, making me feel worse.

“I do too, No Lips,” cooed Doug. I tried to stand but managed only an 80-degree angle before crumpling back into an all-fours stance. My only experience with alcohol had been with beer. A case of Schaeffer Light did you the courtesy of providing a glutted, anesthetized, and somnolent sensation to warn you of oncoming drunkenness. André just snuck up and kicked your ass. My lurching induced a fresh cannonade of laughter. I heard Doug say, “And he's a lush on top of it.” He sounded as if he were on another planet, as if his voice had to travel three or four seconds to reach my ears.

On my second attempt, I succeeded in standing. I grabbed the remaining bottle and chugged the dregs. Pausing to wipe champagne spittle off my chin, I announced I was leaving.

“Oh no you don't, No Lips,” Dub said. “You're not driving anywhere. Give me your keys.”

I'm sure I put up resistance, but not enough, because the next thing I knew, I was in the passenger seat of my car, changing eight tracks at every stoplight. Rhonda was driving, and Dub and Missy were following us to the York villa in Missy's Land Cruiser.

Don Henley was fervently warning me about life in the fast lane as we pulled into the circular, red-brick drive, but his advice went for naught. Rhonda put the El Camino in park, turned off the engine, grabbed me by the back of my neck, and began probing my larynx with her tongue. I didn't resist. I tried wiggling my own stamp licker—a chore given the incommodious chamber it was suddenly sharing. I wanted to be able to say I kissed back this time. My eyes, I realized, were wide open. In a
Teen Beat
“Rate Your Kissing” survey that sixth grader Sarah had read aloud on a car trip, I remembered hearing “eyes open” equated with frigidness. In the light supplied by the Land Cruiser pulling in behind us, I could tell Rhonda's eyes were closed.

“Call me,” she said after abruptly pulling away. She tossed the keys in my lap and loped back to the idling vehicle.

I bumped into Allison Kimble in the hallway on my way to English this afternoon. She asked me if I had gotten my acceptance to SDCC yet. I told her no.

“Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you,” she said, faking solemnity.

“Nice sweater,” I said, referring to the one tied around her shoulders. I didn't intend for her to hear. She was entering her classroom.

“Nice earrings,” she said without turning around.

It was rare for the astronaut and me to be home simultaneously, especially on a Sunday morning, but he was in the kitchen nuking Lean Cuisine when I staggered downstairs the following day.

“Why aren't you golfing?” I asked. Bed gnomes had replaced my blood with battery acid and I was expecting solitude.

“Fine, thank you,” he said. This was as funny as the astronaut got. He fussily pulled the plastic film off his low-cal chicken fettuccine and tossed it in the garbage can.

“Yummy-looking breakfast you got there,” I said.

“I call it lunch. After one in the afternoon, the meal we have is called
lunch.”

I had slept until one?

“I've already golfed,” he continued. “I shot a seventy-nine. I appreciate your concern.”

The bastard could even golf. He had taken up the sport only three years ago, and, as with most of his passions, he wouldn't quit until he mastered it. He bought the instructional videotapes. He took lessons, subscribed to
Golf Digest,
hit balls at the all-night driving range. Why couldn't he suffer a midlife crisis and buy a Corvette like all the other Clear Lake fathers? Maybe take up cliff diving—something that could really get him hurt.

I stepped around the astronaut, who was eating over the sink—the place where most of our meals were consumed at home—and opened the refrigerator door. I pulled out three tortillas, rolled them up, and devoured them sans toppings. Doug had explained to me once that tortillas, like life rafts on luxury liners, expand exponentially. Once in your stomach they search out loitering alcohol and sop it up into harmless starch mush.

“You'll never get any bigger eating that way,” the astronaut said, scrutinizing me with the eye of a rancher sizing up soon-to-be-auctioned bulls.

I said nothing and plodded back toward the stairway leading to the sanctuary of my room.

“This letter from your sister has been sitting here a couple days,” he said before I reached safety. I returned and took the envelope from his hand but waited until I made it to my room before opening it.

 

'sup, bro?
[One year in an ethnically diverse school and she thought she was MC Lyte.]

high school = cake, no problemo

u/al… ¿all quiet on the eastern front?
[Forgive her, her style, O Lord. We let her read e. e. cummings and listen to Prince as a child.]

wanted 2 send enclosed school mug shot for your wallet… feel free 2 tell buddies i'm babe you scored in canada on fishing trip w/al… but u must tell me, and get names and phone numbers, if any of them say i'm hot or fine…
[On the back of the photo, she had written in the sissified script
no male can duplicate, “stevie, u and the trout were biting, you were better”]
¿what is it w/high school? i thought every1 would b a bit < asinine… in student council we spent our first meeting deciding the colours
[She had mastered pretentiousness]
of the streamers for gym decoration… the principal said he's considering bringing drug dogs on campus and searching our lockers, yet all we can talk about is whether we should go with traditional blue and white or choose something radical like a navy blue-columbia blue combo… please write back with some brotherly advice.
[Go with the traditional blue and white, for God's sake!]

by the way, brother, u seem 2 have charmed a friend o' mine… i don't mean to be gossipy, but it appears all your late nights with god (i've heard all about it—no thanks 2 u) has 1 of my friends taking down her keanu reeves posters…
[I knew where this was heading—Rhonda must have written Sarah about me.]
¿was it your rippling pectorals as you brandished a hammer? ¿could it have been that enchanting spell u cast on defenseless maidens? ¿perhaps your beguiling nordic complexion?
[Sarah believes she governs the rotation of the planet with her punctuation. Were she ever to end a sentence with a period, time, as we know it, would freeze—her semicolons, in fact, throw off the atomic clock a smidgen.]

it could be any number of things as far as i'm concerned, stud, but something about you has dub circling prom dates on her calendar

—s

Standing on tiptoes I reached for the rigid blue plastic casing of my Battleship game and pulled it down from the top shelf of my bedroom closet. I snapped open the cover and withdrew the three-inch pipe and sealed Baggie of marijuana stashed in the compartments that once housed aircraft carriers and destroyers. Stuffing the contraband in the front pocket of my cutoffs and throwing on a Dr. Zog's Sex Wax T-shirt, I traipsed out the back door and followed the trail through the dunes to the surf. I wandered a half mile down the beach, listening to the Afghan Whigs on my Discman, before plopping down on the sand. I stuffed the bowl of the pipe with what little pot I had on hand. I hadn't been smoking or buying much lately, managing an entire six-week grading period without getting busted at school. Using a trusty Bic disposable, I lit the pipe and took the first hit. Twenty minutes later I was a kite.

Midnight found me torpid, searching the Southern California night sky for a star, any star. Dub and I used to lie naked on the floor of her bedroom and study stars through the glass of her French doors.

I had gone into DeMouy's office earlier in the day to tell him I was quitting the assignment.

“Fine,” he said.

“I'm serious,” I said. “I really
can't
go on.”

“I understand,” he said.

I stood and wiped my eyes with the sand-free portion of my palm. I began walking home, soon I was jogging. By the time I could see the lights of my mother and sister's house I was sprinting. I vaulted upstairs, flipped on the Macintosh power switch, and wrote.

I don't think I've mentioned I was already in love with Dub—had been since the first day she spoke to me. I know what you're thinking: mature, true, lasting love isn't conceived in a six-minute exchange walking from geometry to world history, that what I was experiencing was some puerile infatuation. All I can tell you is that I had never felt this way about a girl before and I doubt I ever will again. The fifty-five-minute span I sat behind her every day in geometry was my primary motivation for breathing. I spent the rest of my cognizant hours conceiving one-liners like some vaudevillian hack, so I could glibly toss them into our conversations (“Mrs. Lanigan's wearing a turtleneck to cover hickeys”). I memorized her class schedule, which had fallen like the Seventh Seal, unwadded, from her backpack pocket, resulting in a system of trails and choreography that allowed me to give her a rote nod and mouthed “hey” in yet another hallway.

The list only gets longer and increasingly pathetic. Every song on the radio had become “Ode to Us,” complete with mental transference of Steve and Dub into starring roles. Daily wardrobe was screened with Dub's tastes in mind—vests, beads, bracelets, untucked tie-dyed T-shirts, battered
Levi's, Doc Martens. I drove by her house. I stopped just short of carving our names in an oak tree on the village green.

I had assumed that, in long-running television series fashion, Doug and Dub's squabbling and competitiveness would escalate in such a way that their only recourse would be choosing a second and dueling or fornicating against the back wall of the gym. But with the arrival of Sarah's dispatch, I found my love requited—the morning after I'd risked mononucleosis with the object of my desire's close friend.

•   •   •

“I suppose if I had given you shit about your never having done heroin, you'd be playing bass for Alice in Chains by now?”