Like We Care (22 page)

“Like a mug book!” Art Berndt laughed. The room broke up.

Todd was disgusted. Mr. Kolak remained at the podium. Two adults were whispering something about him behind their hands.

“I think that’s something you ladies should look into,” the mayor said. “I know you’ve got your hands full, Fran, but. . .”

“I’d be happy to take charge of it,” she said solemnly. “We’re a community. There are always answers if we work together.”

“And about that parking lot,” the mayor continued, sensing that the closing gavel was at hand. “Look, we were all young once. We all remember how important silly things seemed to us at the time, just as we remember how quickly we moved on when some other distraction came along.”

Todd ground his teeth. He wished he was as brave as Mr. Kolak, taking the microphone against these assholes.

“As soon as they see that we’re not paying attention to their little protest, they’ll drift off to find some
new
way to get our goat!”

A knowing murmur and satisfied cluck rose from the gallery. They liked this mayor. They might just register and come out to vote for her next time she came up for reelection.

But probably not.

When nearly a dozen of the adults bumped into each other at the Happy Snack on the way home from the meeting, everyone suddenly inspired to shore up the store’s profitability, more than one remarked at what a heady experience it had been to actually get involved.

“The system works!” marveled Connie Pike.

“Six-forty-four,” said Daljit Singh, his hand outstretched.

Frank Kolak drove Todd home in silence. He knew he was going to hear about this, both from the school administration and from parents.

He was going to hear about this.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Todd asked suddenly, studying his teacher sullenly. “What they’ve been doing.”

Frank said nothing as he pulled up to the curb in front of Todd’s house. Todd waited, then opened his door.

“See you in class tomorrow.” Mr. Kolak tried to smile. “Pop quiz. You’ve earned a heads-up.”

“Thanks,” Todd said, looking into the car from curbside. “Hey, are you—?”

“Come on. It’s late.”

Todd let the door close, then watched Mr. Kolak drive away.

It was only a little after nine. But it did feel very, very late.

A
nnie’s story aired on a Thursday night. Titled
We’re Not Buying This Sh—!
the half-hour, at John Viceroy’s insistence, had received significant promotion, the saturation ads featuring the most provocative sound bites from Joel, images of him tearing his shirt off, and teasing uses of the digitally-censored word “shit.” Furious metallic thrash—really mean stuff, stuff that made Rage Against the Machine sound like Abba—was used to promise ranting, teeth-bearing anarchy. It completely misrepresented the show’s content, Annie knew, but it worked.

Manny Clarke, managing editor of R
²
Rev’s alleged “news division,” hosted. Sweetie-P, still looking for promotional opportunities for his greatest hits CD, agreed to a brief interview on the subject of commercialism, offering up a bloodless shout-out to the multi-tiered, savagely efficient marketing machine with which he shotgunned product (his own and that which he was hired to endorse) to his fans.

Executives at companies like Nike and Philip Morris were taped ambush-style outside their offices, refusing to address the subject of the youth market (as Annie knew they would), but looking sufficiently guilty of
something
while ducking into limos and racing away.

Annie found a youthful marketing professor at NYU who testified to the staggering buying power of the American teen, one of the most ferociously sought after components of the entire retail economy. Simple graphs, illustrating dollars spent annually by teenagers since the youth revolt of the mid-’60s, provided breathtaking proof that never before had so much money been there for the taking from a consumer group practically
begging
to be raped.

“Teenagers have the American economy by the short hairs,” Manny Clarke read from Annie’s script. “But what kind of power is it if all you ever do is pay them what they want?”

Cut to the Happy Snack.

Annie had worked nearly 30 hours straight with the Joel tapes, distilling his unvarnished rabble-rousing into one tightly-cut invocation. She knew she could never lose sight of the fact that the very thing that defined her target audience—the herd mentality, the miserably short attention span, the blunt, irreversible dismissal of anything that attempted to impart knowledge—could cause them to bolt in an instant if they caught even a whiff of a lecture.

She learned to watch the Happy Snack crowd on the tape as closely as she did Joel: When did their attention wander? Where were the applause lines? What made the bully boys
woof
their concurrence? What made the girls squirm? Where was the essence of what Joel was trying to say?

Alone with his image in the editing bay in the middle of the night, it was hard to not let Joel run free. There was a purity to the boy and to the fuzzy thoughts that had gone from Todd’s to his own that cast a kind of spell over Annie.

On her trip back to Berline to gather more material and to confirm one last time that she wasn’t completely out of her mind, she had spent some time alone with Joel. In a Burger King booth late one night, she listened with growing empathy to a boy whom she came to realize used a docile swagger and the free pass given him by virtue of his attractiveness and easy charm to mask a pretty lousy home life. She heard about his parents’ hateful divorce—so common these days as to be undeserving mention, but always so lacerating for the kid living through it.

His father was an asshole, a bitter and small-dicked turd (Annie was moved to speculate) who clearly drew sustenance by taking out his own failures on his son. Apparently something of a tomcat, the old man had cheated openly on Joel’s mother for years before meeting a woman for whom he wished to officially trade up. But right around the time that the first marriage was done away with, the new fiancée cut him off at the knees.

Joel was fourteen at the time, a churning bouillabaisse of hormones and tangled carnal thoughts, and this hot young thing who broke up his home had been promised to him as a new mother of sorts. When she left, she in effect walked out on both father and son, leaving the elder spiteful and obsessed with finding the razor blade hidden inside future romances, and Joel simply baffled: Dad hurt Mom, made her sad pretty much all the time now, because he wanted this other one more. But then the new one started hating Dad—Joel heard her laughing at him that last night they fought—and right away Dad was hating her
and
Mom, and now he’s got different girlfriends all the time who he says really mean things about when they’re not around or when they won’t get out of bed in the morning and go home.

A lot of these girls, Annie didn’t need to be told, were right around her age. Pretty, tin-hearted darlings with a weakness for bad boys and swarthy deadbeats. Like Hutch Posner.

Other than the increasingly strained visitation weekends, the only time Joel saw his father anymore was at sporting events. For as long as Joel could remember, sports were the one thing that drew father and son together. Even when things started to go bad with his mother, Joel’s dad never missed a game, never failed to take a seat as close to the action as possible to cheer when Joel did well, and to bitch—at coaches, at refs, at the kids on the other team—when Joel was trifled with. So long as Joel competed at something—
anything
—he’d know where his father was.

But even sports had grown sour, ever since Mom and Dad started taking separate seats in the stands.

As Joel matured as an athlete and began to craft a persona, much was made of his coltish detachment during play. No matter how spectacular and game-turning his accomplishments, Joel Kasten kept his head down, his showboating in check. It was his trademark.

The thing was, he
wanted
to look to the stands for his parents’ approval. Nothing had made him prouder when he was little. But now, Dad’s sitting over
here
; Mom’s over
there
. Dad’s brought another new girlfriend, Mom’s. . . Where’s Mom? Joel knew that she often just sat out in the car and smoked during the games. Sometimes, on the drive home, he’d gently quiz her to see if she really had been watching, because he had been searching the stands for her all night and she didn’t seem to be there.

So mostly he just kept his head down.

Joel told Annie all this quietly, with gangly shrugs and endearing attempts at boyish machismo. Nothing he said rang true to her life. Her folks, for all their mustiness, remained faithfully, resolutely together. Marriages imploded all around her as a kid, nearly half of her friends subjected to versions of the hurt and disruption that Joel lived with, but Annie and her siblings made it through with their originally-issued set of parents. Only recently, and even then just passingly, did she regard their fidelity as an accomplishment as opposed to a fate imposed on them by a lack of other opportunities. Surely the only reason people stayed together these days was because no one better came along.

Joel had a thing for Annie—that was obvious. She was older, good-looking, prone to doting on him, if only for the purpose of getting him to bare his soul. She would catch him looking at her and realize he had a crush.

But she was thinking of him more and more. Here was a boy—soon to be a man—who had yet to make that turn into a bastard. Thanks to his old man, he was sure to be utterly fucked up when it came to women. The victimhood of his mother, the betrayal and spitefulness of his father, the idolization that Joel had already enjoyed as a looker—these were good things to hard-wire into a kid. Once that turn came, once this handsome, charismatic boy found his balls fully dropped and his potential for conquests unlimited, he could very well end up just one more dashing toxin for a single girl to be poisoned by.

Oh, yes, let’s see one more of
those
set loose amongst us.

Almost better for a young woman to take such a boy by the hand and escort him through the back end of puberty, to gently acclimate him to the harsh and cynical world of relationships beyond twelfth grade. To prove to him that, despite his father’s teaching, a woman could be nurturing and kind. To show him that his charisma could be harnessed as an agent of good, instead of a tool with which to easily win him whatever he wanted.

And if in the bargain she found a man who had yet to be contaminated. . .

“How twisted am I?” Annie grimaced to herself, shaking off these three a.m. reveries by darting out from the editing room for a smoke. “How sad am I?”

After allowing for ads (show of hands: see the irony?), the piece ran about 22 minutes. The one concession Annie ended up making to a meddling John Viceroy was a brief interview segment with Neil Young, the grizzled rock icon who had survived with his integrity pretty much intact since the Summer of Love and who—once upon a time, like when Annie was
ten
—saw an upward spike in his iconoclastic career when he took on corporate sponsorships and advertisers’ betrayal of rock and roll. Viceroy “just happened” to come by the stage when Young was interviewed, scoring an autograph and getting to hang for a moment with a demigod of his youth.

He pumped Young’s hand one last time before Annie shooed him away, before he could whip that photograph out of his wallet. Then she watched as the musician wiped his hand on his pant leg, to rid himself of something gummy.

“He’s a really big fan,” Annie said in apology.

“Nobody cleared it with me,” the artist mumbled dourly.

The interview actually wasn’t a bad suggestion on Viceroy’s part, and if it kept his enthusiasm up, great. To that end, Annie also wasn’t above fanning what was an obvious attraction that Viceroy had for her. He was a well-known adulterer (“Use the force, Joel! Don’t surrender to the dark side!”), and if she gave him reason to believe that she might fall to his scary good looks and awesome corporate power. . .