Only Love Can Break Your Heart (19 page)

14

ALL THE INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH ANTISEPTIC
cleaners in the world can’t purge the stench of oily, pimpled, hormone-charged vileness that permeates the halls of public high schools. The funk hangs in the air like a green mist, almost visibly wafting from the vents of the lockers lining the walls. It is an honest odor; human beings are, after all, a fairly wretched lot.

There were plenty of familiar faces in the halls of Randolph High, including my old tormenter, Jimmy Hutter—once the formidable bully, now just another average white boy among the bustling, blended halls of the proletariat, shuffling along with his eyes downcast, hoping to be ignored. Indeed, in classes of thirty-five or more, one could practically disappear. As the new kid, I would stand out for a few days, but soon enough I’d be just another face among the throngs.

When registering for classes, I learned from the guidance counselor that I would need at least two elective credits to graduate on time. My mother suggested that I take a drama class.

“Maybe now’s the time to get back into it,” she said. “You need an outlet.”

An outlet
. I imagined myself as some sort of robot, like C-3PO, my penis replaced by a dangling electrical cord plugged into a wall to recharge.

“You’ll never guess who’s the teacher,” my mother said.

“Who?”

Her eyes flashed with an anticipation that could only be called girlish.

“Mr. LaPage,” she said.

I remembered Rex LaPage all too well. Years before, when he was still the drama director at the Spencerville Fine Arts Center, Rex had been the one who approached my mother backstage after the summer performance of
Peter Pan
to recruit me for his forthcoming production of
Mame
.

“One day, honey,” I remembered Rex once telling me, “I’ll be bragging to people how I was the one who gave you your big start!”

Back then, Rex was new in Spencerville. Like a lot of small-town little theater directors, Rex was a refugee from the New York theater world, where he’d been good enough to earn an MFA at NYU and a slate of off-off-Broadway and touring company credits but never managed to reach the level of not having to wait tables to make rent. Thanks to his advanced degree, Rex had credentials, so he scoured the want ads and found his way to Spencerville, where he was treated like the second coming of Oscar Wilde by the wealthy, culture-starved grandes dames whose fund-raisers kept the fine arts center running. For years, Rex LaPage helmed the theater program at the fine arts center, to varying degrees of success. But money woes had left the center on the verge of closing its doors. When the longtime Randolph drama teacher retired, Rex’s advocates persuaded their friends on the school board to fast-track his teaching certification and offer him the position.

We had that in common to start with, Mr. LaPage and I. Rex had a semester’s head start getting acclimated to Randolph’s indignities, but we were essentially the same—strange birds brought to land in a foreign tree.

Drama classes were held not in the theater but rather in the adjacent basement, which doubled as a classroom and green room: a dim but warm space cluttered with old props and scenery. The walls were covered with posters from past productions, autographed by casts and crews. One long, white-painted cinder-block wall was covered with quotations of favorite lines from at least a decade’s worth of plays, written with black permanent markers and accompanied by the autographs of the students who’d selected them. Instead of desks, students sat on a motley collection of old couches, recliners, and folding chairs.

There was no escaping the recognition of Rex LaPage, who found me immediately among the slouching wave of sullen indifference that tramped down the stairs for fourth-period Introduction to Theater Arts.

“My Young Patrick,” LaPage cried. “Look how you’ve grown! Not quite the chubby little cherub anymore, are we?”

He seemed much smaller to me, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, with the exception of a few flecks of white in his beard and mustache and rather distinguished-looking patches of silver at his temples, Mr. LaPage was exactly as I remembered him: thin, narrow legs in dark jeans; disproportionately large, powerful hands; thick, long eyebrows that moved wildly above his flashing blue eyes.

“I guess not,” I replied.

He held on to my shoulders, beaming at me as if I were a long-lost child instead of a kid he faintly remembered from a few unremarkable weeks’ worth of rehearsals and performances nearly seven years before. What can I say? He was a drama teacher.

Finally he released me. I retreated to an empty club chair near the back of the room. I hunched down into the chair and waited for class to begin. Behind me, I heard the sound of voices in the shadows.

“She literally took the brush out of my hand and started painting,” a girl said. “On
my
picture. Can you believe it?”

“That woman is the enemy of all creativity,” a boy’s voice answered.

I peered over the back of the chair. An older-looking boy and girl sat in a collapsing love seat. The girl’s face was partially hidden behind a mass of dark hair with streaks of a burnt-orange dye. She wore a black leather biker’s jacket and a long skirt that resembled a Mexican rug over a pair of red sixteen-hole Dr. Martens.

I had seen the girl before: she worked as a clerk at the Kroger where we did all our grocery shopping. The way she passed the items over the electric eye and fired the numbers into the cash register gave her an air of apathy beyond her years.

“What have we here?” she asked.

“An interloper, I’d say,” the boy replied.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone was behind me.”

“Well, now you know,” the girl said.

I smiled and shrugged.

“OK, buh-bye, now,” she said.

She waved her fingers. I sank back into the club chair and turned my attention to Mr. LaPage, who was just preparing to introduce the new student to the class.

“We have a new addition, people, and I know from experience that he’s quite the talented performer,” he said.

A few snickers followed.

“Stand up, would you, honey?” LaPage said.

I rose without protest, hoping to end my misery quickly.

“Class, this is Richard,” LaPage said. “Richard, class.”

I offered a meek wave to the blanket of slack, dull faces and then sank back into my chair.

Mercifully, Mr. LaPage did not force me to participate in any of the day’s exercises—a typical drama-class improv game, followed by a required “scene” performance in which two white students gave an unintentionally amusing rendition of a scene from
A Raisin in the Sun
. After class, I managed to slip away without having to face LaPage again, lurching up the stairs and into the light, where I prepared myself to run the gauntlet of the school cafeteria.

By the time I entered, the tables were all flooded. The room rippled with noise and energy. No one seemed to acknowledge my presence at all, and yet I felt a palpable fear, as if at any moment I might be hit with a blindside tackle or a lethal projectile. Lowering my head, I walked straight through the room, pushing through the rear doors out onto the smoking patio, continuing on past the hoodlums in their blue jean jackets and the skate punks with their Mohawks and bangs dangling down to their pouting lips, into the yard and out toward a solitary tree. There, I thought, I might consume my turkey sandwich without being violated.

I leaned up against the tree and removed my sandwich from the brown paper bag on which my mother had used a Sharpie to write my name with a flourish over a quick sketch of a sailboat. As I chewed, I noticed the smell of cigarette smoke. From the other side of the tree appeared the girl from drama class—the Kroger checkout girl.

“Did your mommy draw that for you?”

I blushed and nodded. She took a long pull on her cigarette, a Marlboro Light—what Paul used to call a slut butt.

“That’s so cute,” she said. “Does she do that every day?”

“Sure,” I said. “I keep every one of them. They’re all collector’s items. A personal history of sunflowers, sailboats, and daisies.”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

She turned her head and exhaled a long, narrow funnel of smoke.

“Do you like to draw?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I just figured you did,” I said. “You were talking about a painting back in class.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do like to draw.”

“Cool,” I said.

“My name’s Richard,” I said.

“I know,” the girl said. “It’s written on your lunch sack.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my mother’s childish drawing. “Sorry.”

“Cinnamon,” she said.

She held a hand out to me. I reached up and touched the cold tips of her fingers.

“Like the song,” I said.

“What can I say?” Cinammon said. “Hippie parents.”

“I’m pretty into Neil Young,” I said. “My brother was kind of a hippie.”

“You have my sympathies,” she said.

She removed another cigarette from her purse and lit it off the dwindling butt end of the first.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said. “At Kroger. Why did you leave Macon?”

“How did you know I went to Macon?” I asked.

“School uniform,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied.

“It’s a little game I play,” she said. “Trying to figure out what people are like from their clothes and the things they buy. You sure can imagine some interesting possibilities.”

“What did you imagine about me?” I asked.

She ignored the question.

“So, like, for real—why’d you leave Macon?”

“I got booted,” I said.

“What for?”

I doubted that an honest account of the circumstances surrounding my expulsion would get me very far with a girl like Cinnamon.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Ooh,” she said. “Mysterious.”

I shrugged nonchalantly.

“I would have had to leave after this year anyway,” I said. “My old man had a stroke. He lost a lot of money in the stock market.”

“That sucks,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So you’re ex-rich now, is that it?”

“I guess,” I said.

Cinnamon struck me as the type of girl who would appreciate the inherent drama of a sudden reversal of fortune.

“To be honest,” I added, “we’re pretty much broke.”

She tilted her head and exhaled another neat funnel of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

“Welcome to the lower class,” she said.

She turned her head toward the student parking lot. A black Pontiac Fiero idled at the curb.

“That’s my ride,” she said.

“Are you ditching?” I asked.

“Senior off-campus lunch,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I’d invite you along,” she said, “but you’re not a senior, are you?”

“Sophomore,” I admitted.

“You could ditch if you wanted,” she said. “I doubt anyone would notice.”

“I don’t think I’d fit into the car,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? He thinks it’s so cool.”

I didn’t bother to ask who
he
was.

“Guess I’ll be seeing you around,” she said.

She skipped over to the Fiero and slid through the open door onto the passenger seat. I hummed a line from “Cinnamon Girl” in my head.
A dreamer of pictures
, I thought, as the little car rolled over the speed bumps in front of the school and zipped away.

CINNAMON KINTZ APPEARED
to subsist on cigarettes, MoonPies, and Doritos. She spoke of exercise as if it ought to be illegal. She had a crooked canine and an overbite and a slight gap between her two front teeth and a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist, back when tattoos were still rare and edgy. She eschewed bras with scandalous regularity, allowing her breasts to demonstrate their miraculous, gravity-defying firmness and elevation while testing the limits of a dozen different perfectly aged concert T-shirts.

Each day I tried to find something to say to her—some clever quip or non sequitur—or at least to exchange eye rolls as we simultaneously suffered through the indignities of Introduction to Theater Arts with Mr. LaPage.

I wasn’t friendless, mind you. Old acquaintances were renewed and new ones made. Regardless of why it had happened, my having been kicked out of Macon gave me a modicum of what passed for street cred in a small-town public high school. By the end of the first week, I didn’t
have
to sit alone at lunch. Still, I always made a habit of drifting out to the old dead tree where Cinnamon lurked—sometimes with a gaggle of girls or Marcus Vaughan, the curly-haired boy with the cable-knit sweater from drama class, but more often alone.

After a few weeks, I worked up the courage to make the ultimate adolescent male overture: a mix tape, assembled from my burgeoning collection of cassettes, using a dubbing deck I’d acquired to record vinyl records. I plotted the tape out judiciously, blending a variety of familiar hits with offbeat tracks usually hidden on the bottom half of a B side. There were girl-friendly rockers and melancholy acoustic ballads and obscure gems from lesser known acts like Big Star and Badfinger. I debated giving the mix tape a title—“Cinnamon Songs” or “Songs for a Cinnamon Girl.” In the end I concluded that Paul would just act like he happened to be carrying it around. I wrapped it all up with my old friend Neil—not the obvious “Cinnamon Girl” but instead, from
After the Gold Rush
, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.”

Heading out to the bus after seventh period, I saw Cinnamon smoking on the loading dock outside the theater, waiting for her ride.

“Hey, Macon,” she said as I approached her.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” I said.

“Sorry,” she answered. “I guess you need another nickname, now that you’re working class and all.”

“My brother and his friends used to call me Rocky,” I said.

“Rocky?” she asked. “Is that a joke?”

“They thought I looked like a little Stallone,” I said.

“Not really seeing it,” she said. “But whatever. Rocky it is.”

“What about you?” I asked. “How’d you get yours?”