The house alone, Mom would have killed for a peep inside of. She used to tell me how she and her friends would lay out of school and break into teachers’ houses in the daytime to see what booze they had, what was in their bedroom drawers, like porn, vibrators, etc. I was living with a teacher. God alone knows what was in his bedroom, but you could open a store with the crap he threw on his living-room floor. Plus beer in the fridge, Jim Beam in the cabinet. Given how early he went to bed, the man was just asking me to teach him how to share.
But that didn’t make life easy. At Jonesville Middle they had two little cement bulldogs on towers out front, like guarding the place, and on it went from there as far as being baby-town. An office lady in her clack-clack heels walked me to my new homeroom, and I’m thinking, Lady I hitchhiked to fucking Nashville, you think I can’t walk down this hall by myself? All these puppy eyes looking at me like, New boy! Please don’t hurt me! Was it a town versus country thing, I don’t know, but these kids were oversize Haillies and Brayleys with their wet-combed hair and buttoned-up shirts, some with breakfast crumbs still around their mouths, I swear to God. Sixth graders. No comprehension.
Did they know more than me as regards pronouns and subjunctions, Roman civilization etc.? Yes. Being checked out of school mentalwise for the last year and then some, I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass. But the weirdness wasn’t in what I didn’t know. It’s what I did know. How to watch your back at all times. What a hooker means by “fun” and an asshole means by “discipline” and a caseworker means by “We’re working on it.” And money. Christ. Watching these kids pull it out of their pockets in fistfuls of fives or ones or tens, holding out the whole wad for the lunch lady to pick through, like they don’t know the difference. Or don’t care. Outside at recess, betting and losing actual quarters over utterly ignorant shit, like who holds his breath longest or will that bee fly up Miss Wall’s dress and sting her twat.
What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. I didn’t want to be like these other kids. But I didn’t want to be the freak fish out of water anymore either, dead sick of that. Feeling every minute like somebody’s going to call me out, tell me I’ve got no business walking around that place in expensive new shoes, and should go back to whatever shithole I crawled out of.
The Air Maxes, new jeans and all that, another story of weirdness. Angus took me shopping. Coach headed off to Saturday practice and said to go get me what I needed. Nobody asked me, we just took off in U-Haul’s Mustang, Angus up front with Snake Man, me in the back seat fixing to shit myself. How far would this adventure go before they found out I had smoke-all in the way of cash, being the question. Pretty far, was the answer. I tried telling Angus I would stay and wait while they did their shopping, but she said not to be an idiot, get out of the car. U-Haul stayed. I followed Angus into Walmart, down one aisle after another with her throwing stuff in the cart. First groceries. What did I like to eat, she wanted to know. Anything that’s not rotten, the more the better, I said. She rolled her eyes like I was purposefully being a dick.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You don’t want to know some of the crap I’ve eaten before.”
“Like what?” She frog-eyed me. “Human livers? Used Tampax?”
Jesus. I meant things like the Mr. Goodbar I ate after it ran through the McCobbs’ washer. But this Angus individual was like, frayed-electric-wire level of shocking. I think the boy version worked better, except for that not being a person. She leaned into the cart with her elbows sticking out and tore around the store playing her sick game. She’d hold up a box and yell, “Which do you like better, yo—this, or toe jam? This, or shark piss?”
We left some shoppers ready to lose their lunch and moved on to menswear. I told Angus I wasn’t buying any clothes.
She stared. “What is your deal, dude?”
“No deal. Thanks all the same.”
She shook her head like I was a mental case. Which pissed me off. I didn’t yet know the rules here, fine, but I couldn’t see Angus getting to treat me like a dipshit.
“I like what clothes I have, okay? I’m good. Can we just go?”