Palo Alto: Stories (6 page)

One time, Ed and Ivan and Howard, and I went over to Ed’s after school. Howard brought a water balloon launcher. Ed’s parents weren’t at home so we drank some Jim Beam, and then we picked a bunch of fat oranges from the tree in Ed’s backyard, and went up on the roof with the water balloon launcher.

When kids rode by on their bikes, we shot oranges at them. Girls and boys.

The launcher launched the oranges hard. It must have hurt when they hit. Tom Prince rode by and we hit him right on his big ass. It sounded like a slap on a face, and even from the roof, I could see his ass ripple through his pants. He got off his bike and started throwing oranges back at us on the roof.

Tom Prince had horrible face acne, which sprouted in small groupings, like piles of bat shit. The piles were always runny because he would pick at them. He was an angry, fat young man.

He threw a bunch of oranges, but he couldn’t hit us. We laughed and laughed at the fat-ass on the ground.

Howard was laughing too.

Then Tom stopped throwing and yelled, “What the fuck are you laughing at, you anorexic fuck? Why don’t you go and slit your wrists again, you fat, pear-shaped piece of shit.”

Howard stopped laughing. He yelled at Tom so loudly he almost fell off the roof. It was funny that Tom called Howard a pear, because Tom was shaped like a pear too. An even fatter pear than Howard. Tom got on his bike and rode off and Howard was still yelling.

We shot at more kids with the launcher. Then we hit a small Asian girl in the head and it made her fall off her bike. We hid on the back side of the roof and peeked over. She was crying when she picked up her bike. But she didn’t do anything; she just got back on and rode off.

When I left Ed’s that evening to go home, the street was strewn with smashed oranges.

When I got home, my cat, Toby, was waiting for me.

On weekends we had nothing to do. The girls didn’t like us like they liked Jerry and Dan. When they didn’t have plans with the girls, Jerry and Dan would hang out with us. We would go out egging.

We would go out on a weekend night at about nine and ride our bikes to the Lucky’s supermarket on Alma. Late at night there was hardly anyone in the store, and the checkout clerk didn’t care that we were buying five dozen eggs. “Making some omelets,” we would say. Sometimes we would go next door to Bob’s Donuts and buy some bear claws and milk.

Then we would ride around and look for late-night joggers and walkers. If we saw a couple taking a stroll, we would pelt the shit out of them. Usually the man would have to get macho and chase us, but they never caught us. Except Howard. Howard was always the slowest, and he would get caught and have to cry his way out of a fight.

One time Ivan and I stole a motorized scooter. It was sitting in an open garage and we walked in and took it. We could
fit two on it: one to drive and one to throw eggs. It was tiny, but it went pretty fast.

Ivan and I were out on the scooter one night. We didn’t have money to buy eggs, so we took some hard-boiled eggs from my fridge. We saw a white guy in a leather jacket walking with an Asian woman. Ivan slowed down, and I hit the man with two hard-boiled eggs, right on his jacket. I hit the girl once in the head and she bent over. Three hits was pretty good shooting.

The man chased us, but we were long gone.

We went to 7-Eleven to play Street Fighter II. Ivan was better at it. He could play with Ryu, Zangief, Dhalsim, or Blanka. Zangief was Russian like Ivan, but Ivan reminded me more of Blanka. Blanka was a Brazilian beast of some sort. Ivan was kind of a beast. Like he was mean on the outside and sensitive on the inside. And Blanka means “white” in Spanish, and Ivan was very pale, so it all just made me think of him.

I could only play with Guile, a U.S. military guy who could do back flips. But he had a special invisible throw if you knew the code.

In the middle of one of our games, a car pulled up in the parking lot.

I just knew.

“Run,” I said to Ivan. I ran out the door just as the man in the leather jacket got out of the car.

Across the parking lot, I looked back and saw Ivan messing with the scooter. The man in the leather jacket grabbed him and put him on the ground, and then started
kicking him. I stopped running, but I didn’t go back. I just watched.

The Asian woman was in the front seat of the car. She looked over at me. She didn’t look sad for Ivan at all. When she started calling to the man in the leather jacket, I ran.

I saw Ivan at school on Monday. He had a black eye and his bottom lip was purple at the side. We never talked about the man with the leather jacket to each other, but Ivan told people about it. Ivan told the story like I had left 7-Eleven before the guy even came.

Brian was a kid from Los Angeles. He had a tattoo of an eight ball on his leg, but it was smeared. He wasn’t supposed to get it wet the day after he got it, but he took a shower. It looked like a drawing that had been wiped with a sponge.

I went with him to JJ’s house. JJ was a skateboarder. He had a half-pipe in his backyard. I wasn’t good on the half-pipe.

JJ had a BB gun. We stood in his backyard and shot at birds that flew overhead, but didn’t hit any.

JJ sold me the BB gun for $50.

When I had the BB gun, Ivan and Ed and Dan and Jerry and I took it out. We walked in the creek by my house, Matadero. It was a cement creek that ran from one side of town to the other. The water got really high when it rained. My dad said not to go in it. He said that every winter, when
the water got high, kids would take a raft in it, and someone would drown.

But that was when I was little. When I was in eighth grade, we went into it all the time. Sometimes we would catch crawfish and step on them and they’d crunch. We also burned things down there: a stuffed bear that an ugly girl gave me on Valentine’s Day, sitting on a little wooden chair that my brother made. It smelled like chemicals.

We walked down the creek with a BB gun. Dan hit a bird, and it dropped to the dirt. It wasn’t dead, so he shot it a bunch more times until it stopped moving.

We shot at house windows from the creek. We made designs in the glass. We almost made a smiley face in one, but the eyes were crooked.

We walked down the creek, all the way to Hoover Park. Some men were working on a roof. They were bent over in construction hats and hammering boards. Jerry aimed at one of the men. He missed once, and then he hit him. The man stood up. The way he stood, we knew Jerry got him in the ass. The man looked around and then he ran to the side of the roof. We all ran back down the creek toward my house.

It was far to get back to my house. In the bottom of the cement creek the water was low and we ran down there. The bottom was covered in slime and it was easy to slip, but it was harder to see us down there because the cement walls on the sides were high.

We could see the construction man’s car stop on all the bridges over the creek. He was looking for us, and we ran faster.

Finally we made it back to my house.

Inside, we rested. We watched some of
Diff’rent Strokes,
and then everybody left.

Later, someone stole the BB gun. I don’t know who, but they’re out there shooting things.

In high school, Howard Vern got a paint pellet gun. The balls were brightly colored: yellow, green, red, blue, white, orange, and black. They were round and waxy like candy.

One night I slept over at Howard’s house. At midnight, Bill came by in his jeep. Bill was handsome, but retarded. It was hard for him to put sentences together, and his emotions were all fucked-up. Other days, he and I spent a lot of time smoking pot and doing pull-ups on a bar above his bedroom door.

I wasn’t friends with Jerry or Dan anymore. They played on the school sports teams, and started calling me a fag after I quit the football team. They said Ed and I were gay together. It made me want to stay away from Ed because everyone started saying we were gay. Some girls even made up a song and a dance about us. I never saw the dance, but I heard about it.

Bill and Howard and I drove around town thinking about things to shoot with the paint pellet gun. We shot stop signs and mailboxes, and we shot at the high school, but those things weren’t very fun.

“Let’s go shoot Alice Henderson’s house,” I said.

Alice was the girl who made up the gay dance about me.
I think that she was mad at me, and at everyone because she was a slut, and everyone knew that she was a slut. I guess the song and dance helped her anger out.

Howard and Bill thought Alice Henderson’s was a great idea and we drove over to the richest part of town, at the end of University Avenue.

All the houses were very big in the area, but Alice’s was one of the biggest. Bill pulled up and I leaned out the backdoor window and fired. The pellets hit the house with a hard, wet sound. I spread the shots around the front of the house, and they left dark flowers on the side of the white wall. I kept thinking of the words
crime, crime, crime,
and
faggot, faggot, faggot.

I was a dark agent of the night, delivering terror in the suburbs while the inhabitants slept. I was evil in anyone’s eyes, but in high school, underhanded action rules.

After Alice’s we wanted more so we shot some other houses. We shot Jerry’s house because he ditched me as a friend, and Eli Fox’s house because he was an annoying guy Howard knew from Hebrew school, and Anna Zimmerman’s house because she had a big crush on me and had no chin. She had given me the bear that we burned.

Later we got caught because Howard’s mom found paint on his clothes. She was a friend of Eli Fox’s parents. The Foxes turned us in and we had to do community service. Jerry called me a fag to my face in front of everyone at school, but he was too scared to start a fight. And I heard that Alice kept doing the gay dance about me.

*   *   *

Some people when they were young shot deer, and foxes. Faulkner shot a bear, Hemingway shot lions and a lot of things. Gangs shoot people for initiation.

We shot animals, and people. But they were all small animals, and we didn’t kill anyone.

He was so cute. Younger, but I didn’t care. He was a change from the assholes in my grade like Adam and Roberto who just wanted to fuck and do it in the ass. Or come on my face like a porn, and tell their friends about it. And with them I was always the last call.

The first time I saw Ryan was over at the Oldses’ house, John and Steve’s. Everyone would go over there all the time. John with all the sophomores and Steve with all the juniors. It was the hangout house. I was always there because Maddy Patten was going out with Steve.

Ryan was there one day. It was after school. He was in John’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed playing a video
game. He had a black Yankees hat on and he looked like an angel. I could tell that he was different, sweeter than the others. He had pain in his eyes.

I stared at him without him knowing. Or maybe he knew. I came up with all these fantasies just watching him play the video game. I didn’t talk to him then.

Two weeks later, there was a party at the Patten twins’ house. They’re my best friends, Elsie and Maddy. The boys called Elsie “Last-Call” because her name sounded like “L-C.” Maddy was still with Steve.

At the party, we three were playing I Never with a bunch of other girls. Someone says, “I never… ,” and if you’ve done the thing that they say, like cheated on a boyfriend, you have to drink.

“I never had sex at school.”

I drank.

“I never had sex with two guys at once.”

I drank.

“I never had sex with three guys at once.”

When it was my turn to say “I never,” I had a hard time thinking of things to say. I said, “I’ve never been in love.” So stupid.

A couple of the girls drank. Elsie didn’t drink, but Maddy did, and I thought she was stupid because that meant that she loved Steve. But then I thought that maybe it wasn’t so stupid. There was something inside me that was saying that I was in love with Ryan, even though I had never talked to
him. I had this feeling all of a sudden like I wanted to take care of him.

Then it was funny because he walked in. He was with John Olds and some sophomores. I stopped playing I Never and I went over to him.

“Hey,” I said.

His friends gave him looks. He acted shy. He was like a deer.

“Hey,” he said.

“You wanna play quarters?”

He and his friends and me and some junior girls played. Pork, and Adi, and the Pattens, and me versus the sophomore boys.

We were playing on the island in the kitchen. I’m very good at quarters. They were very bad, and we killed them. After a while they all looked sick. We played eight rounds and they got it in once. On the eighth round, Ryan’s friends each took a tiny sip because they couldn’t take anymore. They left the whole pitcher for Ryan.

“You gotta drink it all, shithead,” said Pork. She
was
a porker. All the guys called her Pork because she had big tits and a big ass, she was loud and rude, and her hair was big and brown and curly like a beast’s. I told her to shut up. Ryan took the pitcher in both hands and drank. It started spilling around the sides of his mouth and onto his shirt. He got wet and then wetter. He couldn’t finish it all.

“Finish the backwash,” said Pork.

“Shut up, Pork,” I said.

I never called her Pork to her face. Elsie laughed.

“Fuck you, bitch, go ahead and play with your little kids,”
said Pork, and she left the kitchen. I laughed. Elsie said she was going to piss, and the other girls left. Ryan was trying to take big breaths, but he was doing it very slowly. He was swaying.

“Do you need some air?” I asked.

I took him to the backyard, but a bunch of the junior and senior guys were out there. We went around to the side of the house, to a little side yard. Above, there was a trellis with jacaranda flowers; underneath it was dark and cool. He put one hand on the fence and hung his head. He breathed slowly. Then he crouched low to the ground. He threw up against the fence. I laughed a little, but only to myself. I put my hand gently on the top of his head. After he was done I helped him up under his arm. We stood for a minute in the cool dark. He was hunched with his hands on his thighs. We said nothing, but it was like we were talking. Finally, I asked if he wanted some water.