Tales of the Madman Underground (20 page)

Okay, come to admit it, if I had to do what Marti said every time she cracked me up, I was pretty much going to be her slave forever. “Listen,” I said, “I work at McDonald’s Sunday night through Thursday night. Any time you want to avoid going home, knock on the glass, I’ll let you in. I like to hear you talk.”

“Thank you. I like to hear me talk, too.”

“You’re on some kind of weird streak this morning,” I said, “or I’m just laughing at everything.”

“Well, laughing at everything is probably a good idea, considering what everything is like. Want me to be serious for a second?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We slowed down to join the long line of cars that formed a sort of constipated caterpillar hunching into the parking lot. She glanced at me. “I got done being mad at you for not being a perfect friend, and then over being mad at myself for expecting you to be, about fifteen minutes after I got home; I get mad real big and real fast but I come down quick, too, you know? Anyway, I started to think, and, um—your little plan won’t work.”

“My little plan—”

“To go normal. In the first place, maybe I’m wrong and you’re a turd, but you seem like a pretty decent guy. I don’t think you have it in you to really cut off all your old friends, and I don’t think you’re going to
like
being normal. Here’s a whole line of cars full of kids; how many of them are normal? Most of them, right, by definition? And if you threw a rock down the line what would be your chance of hitting a happy person?”

“Okay, I see your point.”

“Yeah, but I want to explain it some more, till you’re pretty much falling asleep. Seriously, your idea won’t work. You’re trying to do three things that won’t go together—be normal, be happy, and keep your friends. I don’t even think your odds are that good for two out of three.

“So I’m not worried about your plan to go all normal on us. Even if you manage to avoid therapy. The plan won’t work, you can’t stay normal for ten minutes on a bet, and you won’t fool every single teacher all the way to Thanksgiving.

“Not to mention that your scheme is morally grody.

“But based on knowing you one entire day, I can tell you’re
way
too stubborn to be talked out of trying. So go ahead, try, and when it all collapses, you’ll find out I’m the horrible kind of person that will drop by McDonald’s every night you’re there for the rest of the school year, just to say ‘nyeah-nyeah-nyeah, told you so!’”

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, afraid she was right and afraid to say it. “I guess I’ll enjoy the company. I just wish I knew what’s up with Paul.”

We were cruising along our third aisle of marked, paved parking, and Marti asked, “Jesus, aren’t there any parking spaces in
this
county?”

“The school board doesn’t really approve of kids driving. Unless you get here really early, pretty much all the parking is in Crater Field.” I pointed the direction.

“And I bet it wasn’t named after somebody named Crater.” She turned toward the unpaved, pitted, and rutted back lot. “That’s going to kill my shocks,” she said as the LTD rocked like a boat in a storm.

As we got out of the car, I realized, belatedly, that showing up at school in Marti’s car was more embarrassing than arriving in a hearse. But hey, normal guys didn’t worry about things like that, right?

As we approached the big main doors, Harris and Tierden were out front, practicing their smoking skills, and they started making hooting noises as we walked into the school.

“Funny, it’s fall. Shouldn’t the invertebrates be getting ready to hibernate?” I asked Marti, making sure I was loud enough to be heard.

“Only the fit ones. The rest need to perish miserably for the good of the species.”

Harris must not have caught it, and ran a couple of steps after us, saying, “What? What?” before Scott stuck out one of his long skinny monkey-arms and dragged his pudgy buddy back.

I held the door for Marti. Holding doors for girls was one of those things Dad taught me by hitting the back of my head. To cover the fact that I was doing it, I kept talking. “You cracked a joke they didn’t get. They’ll probably forgive you, like, never. Just in case you had your eye on either of them.”

“Only for the specimen jar.” We were going up the main steps. She held out her hand and we traded fives. “Let me know if you ever need anybody to leave a pound of nails in that puddle.”

Without thinking about it, I had followed one of Dad’s commandments:
If anyone tries to embarrass you about anything you do, hold your head up and do it more
. He might have been proud of me. Anyway, Marti was still my friend. Maybe today wouldn’t completely stink.

Gratz spent half the hour on waste-of-time announcements, reading all of them and taking a minute to comment on each one. Sometimes I thought it would be cool to do extracurriculars, play a sport or something, but once you heard the long catalog of all the stuff at the start of the school year—well, I wouldn’t say
not if you paid me
but I’d sure as shit say
only if you paid me.
Science Fair entries were due by November (so get going on that atom smasher now). Show Choir auditions were Friday (don’t just be a social, be a singing social). Tryouts for
Barefoot in the Park
were Monday afternoon (you, too, can be in Paul’s supporting cast). The debate team needed members (and penises). And like all that, on and on.

Darla kept tweaking Mr. Babbitt’s ears and adjusting him and whispering that he was a naughty bunny and this was important, bunnies should listen to the announcements, just quiet enough so that Gratz would have had to ask her what she was saying or doing, and just loud enough to make him a little antsy and nervous; he kept glancing at her like he wanted to ask her to stop but would feel too ridiculous if he did.

It was the thing I liked best about Darla. Well, second best if you counted her big tits. Or was that third best? Anyway, he kept blabbing, she kept talking to the bunny, he got more and more nervous, and I got closer and closer to completely cracking up.

I glanced at Paul, sharing the joke, the way we always did. He jerked his head away like something bit his nose. I looked down at the floor and wished I was dead.

Gratz rambled on through the Future Homewreckers bake sale to buy a new oven, cracking jokes about how if you bought something, you could bring it back and they’d bake it for you. About half the kids in the room laughed, so the percentage of real pathetic loser yummy-yummy-yes-yes-we-love-to-lick-brown-wads-out-of-your-butt-Coach Gratz suck-ups was about average, for a Gratz class.

“All right, now that all of that is out of the way, let’s get you started on our first serious project of the term. I’m going to teach you how to read
Huckleberry Finn.
Now, the first thing you have to learn, is how
not
to read
Huckleberry Finn.
” Then he launched into a tirade.

That was how his classes mostly went; he could lay down a half-hour riff on any of his stock subjects, in his sleep—if he didn’t yell so much he could have done it in
my
sleep, which I’d have appreciated.

You only needed to take enough notes so that you’d remember to agree with him on the test. And if it looked like he was gonna go into detail and say stuff he’d then want to test us on, we would just ask him about prayer in the schools (for), drugs (against), Vietnam (for), or Nixon (against), and he’d rant away the rest of the time.

He started off by telling us that there were three wrong ways to read
Huckleberry Finn,
and we were going to talk about two of them today. The first way, he said, was the Hollywood way. The movies had made out Huck and Jim to be “just all-American boys on a road trip on a raft, like
Easy Rider
but on the river and without the drugs.” (
Easy Rider
was like, years ago, seventh grade or so. I bet it was all cool and groovy when he first used that.)

“But! But! But!” Gratz emphasized, thumping the podium on each
but
. I wished I could smile at Paul and get a smile back. When we were taking “Read Like a Man” from Gratz, we used to count the number of
but!-but!-but!
s in a lecture; there were never fewer than three, and one time there were fourteen. Paul said Gratz was trying to tell us where it hurt, and I said he was telling us what he really wanted out of life.

But, but . . . but. I didn’t look at Paul. It was so not the same I wanted to cry.

Meanwhile Gratz got through repeating everything he’d already said, and arrived back at the same place with even more emphasis. “But! But! But! The all-American-boys-on-a-road-trip version is
wrong
!”

I managed not to gasp with surprise.

Darla was drawing Mister Babbitt on one side of the page. The other side was filled with neat, careful super-tiny handwriting, no doubt a perfect summary of the lecture.

Since we didn’t riot or anything, when we heard that the idea was wrong, Gratz went on to tell us why it was wrong. He had ahold of the podium with both hands now, and he was a-hoppin’ and a-boppin’, a-reelin’ with the fee lin’ as he finished up his point. “So
don’t
try to fake your way through class discussion by pretending you got all caught up in the pretty river and how nice it would be to just drift along with a good friend. Even if you do think you’d look cute in overalls and a straw hat, like some breakfast cereal commercial.”

Lots of people laughed like they were all surprised that a coach watched television. I thought it was about the least surprising thing I could’ve thought of.

“Everybody got that?”

“Yes, sir,” we all chorused—except Marti.

Gratz glared at her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, real meek and stuff. Not like she was challenging him or anything.

He nodded at her, acting all kindly. “You’ll get it.” He looked down at his notes. “All right, the second way not to read
Huckleberry Finn.
This is really sad. Many, uh, black groups have made an issue of the book, and sometimes even tried to get it banned, because there is a
very
important character in the book called Nigger Jim. And because of that fact we will say the word ‘nigger’ pretty often in this class. And when you talk about Jim and the way he is treated, sometimes you’re going to have to say the word ‘nigger.’

“So understand me. First of all and most important, we don’t
ever
call anyone a ‘nigger.’ Not in this class. Not anywhere. When we have to discuss the idea, we always
quote
the word ‘nigger.’ It is okay to say that Jim is an uh, black person who is mistreated and hated because white people
see him as
a ‘nigger.’ It is okay to say that thus and so is what those very prejudiced white people meant
when they said the word
‘nigger,’ and that they meant it about Jim. It is okay to say that part of how they dominated, controlled, and enslaved uh, black people like Jim was that
they classified them as
‘niggers.’ But it is
not
okay to say that—and I am quoting these sentences, from past students who said them and who were made to feel very sorry they said them—‘Jim is a nigger,’ or that Jim was anybody’s ‘nigger,’ or that ‘Jim is running away because he’s a nigger.’ Is that clearly understood by everyone in the room, or do I need to throw someone out of class right now?”

We all stayed silent.

“Now, tragically, some uh, black people are trying to get
Huckleberry Finn,
of all books, taken off the shelf, because it is a
great
book by a
great American writer
in which he launches a
brilliant
and searching at
tack
on
ra
cism. Far ahead of its time. It showed what was
evil
about slavery and about treating a man,
any
man, as a ‘nigger.’

“But to show the evil of racism to anyone, you have to use the words that the racists use. And some
groups
out there insist that
Huckleberry Finn
is a racist book, and that a teacher who teaches it must be racist, and even that the students who read this book will automatically
become
racists, all because”—he whispered dramatically—
“it . . . has . . . that . . . word!”

Looked to me like Gratz had sure found an excuse for saying “nigger” in class.

Darla had started another sketch of Mister Babbitt. She could really draw.

“So,” Gratz said, perching on his desk, “quick review. What do we do with the word ‘nigger’ in this class? Quote or call?”

“Quote,” everyone except Marti said in unison.

“Marti,” Gratz said, “I’m sorry, I keep forgetting that you haven’t had a class from me before. When I call for a group response like that, I expect everyone to respond, all together.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Next time.” He nodded in a friendly way like he’d scritched her between her fuzzy wittle ears. “Okay, again, in this class, quote the word ‘nigger’ or call a man a nigger?”

“Quote,” we chorused, including Marti.

He made a pencil mark on his notes and said, “Far enough for today. Karl Shoemaker, see me after class.”

They all piled out. I approached Gratz’s desk slowly, looking down at my friendly shoes.

“Karl.” His voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. “I guess by now you must be aware that teachers are always noticing everything you do, how it looks to them, who you seem to be, who it looks like you’re trying to become. You know that, right?”

“I guess I do.” I wished to God I could forget.

Gratz nodded. “Look, Karl, I knew your dad well, and I could always count on him. Did you know he was my AA sponsor?”

“Uh, yeah, actually, remember, we talked about that last summer.” Sometimes Gratz and I were at the same meeting. He’d kind of thought, I think, that I’d have him as my sponsor, like it was hereditary or something, and I think it hurt his feelings when I chose Dick Larren. Or maybe he felt like I’d picked a faggot over him; I guess a lot of men would be mad about that.