Fubar (2 page)

“You just graduated with honors, right?”

He nodded and swallowed what was probably camel meat. “Second in a class of 396,” he said proudly, before rattling off the awards he received at graduation. About the only things he left out were the Pulitzer Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I got right to the point with this naïve slob who had to work in a gas station after school for spending money. “I'll give you five hundred bucks to take a college entrance test for me.”

“What?” he stammered. “You must be crazy. I got a full scholarship to Dartmouth. What if I get caught?”

“You won't. The school I'm applying to lets you take the entrance test online. We'll do it here. I'll be with you to login any personal information about me.”

He started laughing. “What college would accept you? Especially at this late date?”

“College at the Sea. In Santa Monica.”

He shook his head and snickered. “Never heard of it. They must take anybody.” Then his voice suddenly took on a serious tone. “Why don't you take the test yourself?”

“I'm kind of rusty on test-taking. It's been eight years since high school.”

“What've you been doing since?”

“You know, a bunch of shitty waiter jobs that I kept getting fired from because the customers and the bosses were assholes.” I couldn't tell him I was also dealing small amounts of pot and selling counterfeit concert tickets to suckers standing at the ends of long ticket lines who never knew they all bought the same seat.

“Why'd you finally decide to go to college now? Especially at your age?”

I told him about the will and it's conditions.

He smiled with crooked teeth that glistened against his dark, olive skin.

“That's it? That's your only reason?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He shook his head back and forth slowly and rolled his eyes upward. “Look, I can get you into that half-assed college. No problem. But how're you going to get into the fraternity? How do you know they'll accept you?”

Shit! I never thought of that. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know but I'll think of something.”

“Another thing,” he continued, smiling. “A guy like you, how're you going to put up with hazing from guys my age?”

Shit! I never thought about that either.

He continued. “I've got friends who rushed fraternities at different colleges. Some made it through pledging and some didn't. But all of them took a lot of shit and embarrassment and humiliation along the way. Could you? You're the laziest, most selfish person I ever met.”

“I'll get accepted somehow.”

He started licking his yellowish tongue clean. “Five hundred isn't much for maybe losing my scholarship if I got caught.”

My voice got cold. “You want the deal or not?”

“You pay me in cash?”

“Yeah.”

“In advance?”

“Yeah.” I pulled out five portraits of Benny Franklin from the front pocket of my jeans and held the fanned bills in front of his face. “Here.”

He didn't take them. I guess I was too quick to pay.

“I want a thousand,” he demanded greedily.

I paused for about five seconds, wanting him to realize that I was seriously thinking about it so he wouldn't go any higher. He didn't know that I'd probably pay him ten grand. “OK,” I finally answered. “A thousand. But that's it.”

Luckily, money wasn't a problem since my mother never bothered to check her bank statements or she'd have spotted the endless checks made out to me where I forged her name.

He paused a little too long for my comfort.

“This is all the cash I've got right now,” I said. “I'll give you the other five hundred when you come back and take the test.”

He stood up, grabbed the dough, and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. “OK. Call me when you want me here.”

_____

A week later this greedy bastard who lived down the hall from me was seated at the small table in my kitchen. My Gateway laptop was in front of him.

“You're lucky your father owns the building,” he said, assessing the computer like an appraising rug merchant.

“Yeah,” I answered slowly, wondering if my father really paid somebody to burn down the old apartment building that used to be here for the insurance money like the arson investigators keep trying to prove.

“The other five hundred first, please,” he said cheerfully.

As soon as I forked it over, he logged on and started warming up, his hands flailing everywhere like a musical conductor.

“Pretty impressive.”

“Someday I'll play Chopin at Carnegie Hall.”

He continued gracefully on the keyboard for a few more seconds in silence before he stopped and looked over at me.

“This computer is much better than mine.”

I didn't answer as he continued his elaborate finger exercises.

When the words TEST WILL BEGIN IN THREE MINUTES came on the screen, Ali Reza reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cashier's check and showed it to me. It was made out to him for twelve hundred dollars and listed as the person who paid, my fucking cousin Lyman!

“What the hell is this?” I screamed.

He smiled. “Lyman paid me to intentionally fail the test for you.”

This was unbelievable. “How'd Lyman know about it?”

“I told him, naturally, to see if he'd outbid you. Like on eBay. And he did.”

“Where do you know him from?”

“High school. We're in most of the honors classes together. Calculus, Shakespeare, advanced physics.”

I really had it with this sand nigger. “So now what?”

“Will you outbid him or not?”

“Look, we agreed on a thousand and you got it. That's enough!”

Suddenly the screen said that the test would start in one minute.

“I'll sell you Lyman's twelve hundred dollar cashier's check for fifteen hundred right now. Take it or leave it.”

I checked my Rolex and the second hand seemed like a spinning roulette wheel. I was running out of time.

“OK. It's a deal. I'll get you the money when I get accepted.”

“Bullshit. Now or never.”

“Will you take a check?”

“No.”

“I don't have fifteen hundred in cash on me. So now what?”

His eyes were riveted to the computer.

“I settle for this.”

“What?”

He stood up. “Otherwise I'm leaving.”

“It cost nearly four grand,” I whined. Except I bought it for two-fifty from some Mexican busboy who said his cousin stole it.

“Then I'm leaving.”

Shit, what choice did I have? “OK.”

“And I keep Lyman's cashier's check, too.”

“OK, you son-of-a-bitch. But you better pass this test.”

He smiled. “Don't worry. I will.”

A few seconds later the test started and the questions flashed on the screen, a minute at a time. As he answered each question, the only time he wasn't smiling was when he was laughing. With jet-black hair, he had the beginning of an old man's lined face with a brush mustache that made him even look older.

As usual, he answered the question on the screen in a few seconds. But since the test was automatically timed, we had to wait the rest of the minute for the next question to appear.

“I can't believe this is a college entrance exam,” he said, shaking his head between questions.

“Why?”

“For two years, I took an SAT prep course every Saturday. I answered thousands of questions.”

“So?”

“So I know a college test when I see it. This is a high school entrance test.”

“Who cares? Just pass it.”

Finally question number 180 was on the monitor and as usual, he answered it in a split-second. He smiled broadly. “I think I scored 100%. Or at least 98% for sure.”

“Great. All I need is a 70.”

“My ten year-old sister could score more than 70.”

_____

Less than a week later I got the acceptance notice in the mail. I
called this blackmailer to tell him that we'd be doing more business together since I had no intention of doing any school work.

“Great,” he answered. “That was the easiest money I ever made.” He paused for a few seconds before adding, “I think I'd better warn you about something.”

“About what?”

“Well, I met Lyman a few days ago to give him his money back since I knew I passed the test. Know what he said?”

“What?”

“That he can hardly wait to use all the shit he's got against you.”

Monday, September 2
10:00
P.M
.

B
EFORE
I
COULD WRITE MY NAME
in the fraternity sign-in book on the table on the front lawn, the guy with the STOVEPIPE nametag sitting across the table facing me clamped his huge hand around my right wrist, instantly stopping the circulation.

“What're you doing?” he demanded, almost yelling over the sounds of Metallica blasting from speakers inside the house.

I yanked my hand out of his vise-like grip. “Signing the book. What the hell do you think?”

He stood up, standing about three inches taller than my 5-9 but weighed about the same 150. Ironically, we both had the same dark, gelled, semi-spiked haircut.

“What're you doing here?” he challenged.

“Rushing. What the fuck you think?”

“Let's see some ID.”

“What the hell's going on?” I pulled out my wallet and showed him my drivers license. “Want to see my American Express Card too?”

Without answering, he checked a printed list of names on the paper that was clamped on his brown clipboard, running his
right forefinger down the list. Finally his finger stopped. “OK. You're on the list of incoming freshmen. Sorry. But you look a lot older than most freshmen. You can sign the book.”

“Great looking signs,” I said, pointing to the flashing purple neon sign of the Zig-Zag man on one side of the front door and the dark-green, neon, Rolling Rock bottle on the other side of the doorway.

“Last year's pledge class stole them,” he said proudly.

Stovepipe printed my name on a stick-on nametag that I pressed on the left side of my shirt and hurriedly walked past him into the house that resembled a glorified two-story, triple-wide trailer.

A huge American flag covered almost the entire wall facing the door. On another wall was a big poster of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. On either side of it were NYFD and NYPD posters. Other patriotic 9/11 shit provided the rest of the room decorations. Some other guys were throwing darts in the corner, using a blown-up bin Laden wanted poster as the target.

About fifteen or twenty guys who looked like future Rotary Club members were milling around a couple of silver Bud beer kegs in the corner of the large, front room that smelled like a distillery. I grabbed a cup of beer, barely sipping its piss-like flavor. Slowly, I walked around introducing myself to everybody, obviously doing a lousy job of trying to fake being friendly. Everybody seemed to be talking and laughing to other guys but nobody seemed friendly to me. Mechanical hellos and stiff, forced handshakes were all I got from anybody. Something was definitely wrong. It was almost like I was wearing a police uniform.

I walked into the large dining room where a long emerald green cloth banner was tacked across an entire wall with two lines of white, block lettering that said:

SIGMA OMICRON LAMBDA
WE PROMOTE FELLOWSHIP

Some guy with short hair and a basketball-sized head shaped like a pumpkin approached me. “Our biggest asset,” he mumbled
somberly like a mortician, pointing to the banner.

After a fast introduction and more stiff, robot-like gestures, he pointed to a few hundred photos on the two walls in front of me.

“Those are all the actives and alumni from the past five years,” he continued in his eulogy-like voice. “All good and true brothers.”

“Oh.”

I could tell that carrying on a conversation with this guy would be like conducting an interview but I tried anyway even though it was like trying to hear an AM station on an FM radio.

“Fraternity membership is invaluable,” this idiot spouted off like he was reading from a teleprompter. “Lifetime friendships, self-confidence, a feeling of belonging, mutual trust. True Christian values.”

I was dying to tell him my goal for being here but naturally I didn't.

Just as I was about to say something else, the sounds of laughter and the sudden whiff of pot floated in through an open window from the back yard. It drew me like a magnet, knowing it'd lead me to the sharper guys.

From inside the back porch, I switched on the outside porch light. As soon as I started walking down the back stairs into the chilled night air, two of the three guys standing out there flicked their joints into some bushes a few feet away. The third guy, with the dark Bart Simpson haircut, just froze where he was standing, with the lighted joint burning in his right hand that clung to the side of his knee.

“I guess I'm busted,” he said, dropping the roach and squishing in out on the grass. In the dim light his cheeks looked pitted like a pineapple.

Before I could figure out what he was talking about, a big, bleached-blond, surfer-looking guy with a pony tail snapped, “I didn't have nothing.” Three tiny silver loops were spaced evenly around the edges of his left ear.

“Me either,” snorted a goofy-looking guy about 6-8 with a shaved head wearing red Air Jordans almost the size of tennis
rackets.

“What the fuck you guys talking about?” I asked.

“Aren't you a narc?” the Bart Simpson guy asked.