The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (22 page)

Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

Eric's sandwich has sauerkraut which goes with the sort of little-old-man image he seems to have built for himself and he pays for all of our lunches to thank Christopher and Randy for “coming to our aid in such a gallant fashion.” Christopher chuckles when Eric says this, toasting with his Styrofoam cup full of Mister Pibb, and Randy says “You're the best” while picking lettuce off his toasted sub which on the menu is called The Dank. Eric makes them promise not to tell anyone our whereabouts, and tells them we'll be “off your hands just as soon as we formulate a plan to spring ourselves from the situation in which we are currently embroiled,” and they do. They probably don't think we're in any more serious trouble than maybe having been caught with some of the product that's depicted in murals all over the walls, spiraling organically out of Bob Marley's hair, raining down from a UFO, being dreamed about by Hendrix in a thought bubble shaped like a marijuana leaf. Tony DiAvalo should be apprenticing at the feet of whatever burnout da Vinci painted the wall in here.

Then Christopher says something about how quiet I am, then after we're done with lunch they take us back to their place, which they share with two other guys but it's still really clean, and it's theirs and it doesn't smell bad in the least, and there are five couches in the living room because “people crash here a lot.”

Christopher is right, people do crash at their house a lot. Albert, one of the housemates, is in a band and they're off on tour, but he offers up the house to other bands that come through town and they do the
same for him, I guess, when he's in their town. So Eric gets a couch and I get a couch and the other couches are split up at different times among members of Get Your Own Back, Tears In The Schoolyard, Andre The Client, and a singer-songwriter named Randall Coats. They're almost all really nice guys. If they're staying here it means Albert and his band are staying at their places in other states which means there are houses like this in a lot of towns all over the country, and I have to admit it's kind of cool. But for a while I don't want to.

A lot of time Eric forfeits his couch to these guys, since he doesn't need a place to sleep.

“Someone is trying to kill us,” Eric says. “I mean, we don't know that for sure. In fact, that's probably the last thing he wants to do. At least to me.”

“That must give you a lot of comfort,” I say.

“Sorry,” Eric says. “But for the purposes of self-preservation, to trigger our deepest self-preservational instincts, we have to think of it like somebody's trying to kill us.”

“So what you're saying is, we shouldn't just sit on the couch reading comics all day?” Because that's what we've been doing since we got here: picking our way through the Preacher series, which Christopher says is his but we can totally read them if we want, in fact, we totally should.

“No. We want these guys to think everything's cool, and we're normal, and we want them to not mind having us around because having a place to go is the only thing that's keeping us … well, ALIVE, if we're going to think about it like we're going to get killed. Which I said was a good idea.” He's doing that more often now, sort of rambling, and where before he would talk for a long time but everything he said would be a new thought and you understood it was relevant even if you didn't understand exactly what he meant, now he'll talk and not everything means something. And it takes him a second to get back into his Preacher book, a second of just sort of staring off into space.

I wish I could say that that's what's bothering me, that someone is trying to kill us, or capture us, or whatever. It isn't. It's more that this place kind of seems like the scene of the crime, the crime being Eric and Christine. Or if not the actual physical scene of the crime, the criminals' postcrime getaway flophouse where they brought their haul, spread all the money on the bed and fucked on it. Or any one of these couches for all I know. So Christopher forgive me if I'm a little quiet, it's me still being angry about it and feeling like shit for still feeling angry because I guess if I'm being honest with myself it's what I did when I was angry that brought us here.

All of the houses where Eric and I live are new, probably newer than either of us, but out here by the college everything's about as old as it gets for the desert, meaning one-story houses from the fifties and sixties. It's kind of cool, actually. Randy and Christopher's house is mostly shaded from the street by a lemon tree that must be older than anything in our suburb, the movie theater, the Olive Garden, our high school, any of it. Before dinner our first night, Eric says something pretty important that I somehow hadn't thought of up until this point:

“What are we going to tell our parents?”

“Well, my dad's easy. Your parents actually give a shit. That might be more difficult.”

“Right.”

“The Man said he was from the college, right? When he met with your parents.”

“Yes.”

“Great,” I say. “He just gave us our out.”

I tell Eric to see if he can borrow Randy's phone. Eric wants to know why I don't just ask to borrow Randy's phone. I tell Eric he's in better with these kids. Eric says okay.

“Randy my good man,” says Eric, finding Randy in the kitchen, cooking: “Would you be so kind as to lend me your cellular telephone for a brief moment?”

Randy laughs. “Sure,” he says. “Don't, like, call Asia.”

We take Randy's phone and go out front since the house is kind of noisy because Randy and Christopher have a couple people over who are all in the living room playing Super Nintendo. My feet crunch on a carpet of leaves underneath the lemon tree. I dial Eric's house phone. Eric looks at me, biting one of his knuckles without thinking about it.

“Hello … Mrs. Lederer? Hello! This is Albert Praetoreous from State. I believe you spoke to my colleague the other day…. Yes! That's him. Yes. Well, as I'm sure Eric told you, some honors students from his school were visiting us today on an orientation field trip—What? He didn't?… Yes, I suppose he can be a space cadet sometimes, but he's also one bright little guy, if you don't mind me saying so. Yes, well interestingly enough, I confided to the students today that we had two foreign scholars who were meant to attend a longer orientation program we often do in the spring, which is this week, and they were unfortunately not admitted to the country. Visa troubles…. I know. I know. I completely agree, it has had a chilling effect on international travel. Well, I was saying this, and Eric piped up and suggested that he and a Mr. Darren Bennett take the place of these scholars in the program…. Right, I had that reaction myself initially, but I actually cleared it with our dean of admissions here, and I said to Eric, if it's alright with your parents … Yes! Of course. He's right here.”

I hand Eric the phone. He gives me a panicked look. I wave at him like, “Just do it.” He puts the phone to his ear.

“Mom? Yeah. Yeah … I'm actually way ahead on homework. Yeah … It seems really good…. Next Wednesday. Yes … I'm really far ahead on homework. No. No, yeah, it's okay. I'll come back and get stuff. Clothes and things. Tomorrow. Okay … Okay. Love you. Bye.” He hangs up.

“Did they buy it?” I say.

“I think they bought it,” he says. “That was a pretty good adult impression.”

“Thanks,” I say. I would've killed it in Mr. Hendershaw's “theater
piece,” I think to myself. Then I think how, not that I ever wanted to, but how if that whole Theater Division thing were something I wanted to do someday, now I pretty much can't, even though it's only sophomore year. And if I wanted to do it in college, I probably wouldn't, because I hadn't done it in high school and I would be way behind everyone else in terms of experience. And then it's weird to think that once I'm out of high school, that will have been high school. Like, the high school years, the ones everybody gets, those will have been mine, written in stone, unalterable forever. And I guess they haven't been bad so far. I didn't talk to anybody and then I made a best friend and then I fell in love and lost my virginity. Soon I'll learn how to drive. Soon I will escape from the clutches of evil with a mutant best friend and we will return to those awkward halls triumphant.

Eric looks alternately thrilled and scared at going out on a big rebellious limb like this. He also looks very tired. I take the phone back from him and pick out another number on the speed dial.

“Hey, Dad?… Hey, I'm going to that college retreat thing…. The college retreat thing. The thing I told you about. In Tempe…. Like a week, I think…. Yep, I have my phone on me…. Okay, uhm, love you, too.”

I hang up. Eric now looks dumbfounded.

“That's it?”

“All parents respect ‘college.'”

“I guess. How did you …?

“What?”

“How did you come from that?”

“I don't know. How did you come from your parents?”

“Yeah, I guess you're right.” We emerge from the darkness of the lemon tree and the whole lawn crackles underneath us as we go back into the house.

The weed-themed sandwiches turn out to be the only meat we see in the week or so we're staying with Christopher and Randy and
their friends. Most everybody else and all the bands that come through the house are vegans. At first I think this is annoying, and I hear my brother in the back of my head saying “I hate fucking hippies.” But everybody being vegan means everybody cooks, because I guess there's not enough good vegan food around, so everybody, the girls and the guys, all cook for each other. Five twenty-year-old people use their tiny kitchen seven or eight more times in a week than me and my dad and my brother use our enormous one. Maybe this week is an anomaly and they don't usually make this much food this often, but it doesn't seem like it. They seem to have their routine down pretty well. Eric doesn't complain or seem to notice one way or the other: he's eating less and less.

It gets pretty okay. The girls are cute and they all have projects they're working on. Sometimes the bands are here to play an actual gig at an actual venue but sometimes they're just playing at the house, which they don't seem to think is any less real than an actual gig, and none of the kids who come to the show do either. And they all talk like Randy and Christopher and some of them are actually being sarcastic but a lot of them aren't, and the girls are really nice, which I guess doesn't necessarily mean they like you, but it's nice when a cute girl in glasses who writes a sex column for the college paper is nice to you either way.

And kids do come to these house shows. And Randy and Christopher and James just let them in, and I'm sure if Albert were here he wouldn't mind either; in fact, he's probably in somebody's house in Tulsa or Washington State right now and kids are showing up to pay the band two dollars so they can buy gas. The most kids come for this guy Randall Coats' show, he just stands in the middle of the room, everybody sitting or standing around, and just him and his guitar, and his songs are a little sincere and a little saccharine for me but Eric leans over and says, “This would be good for the soundtrack,” and I guess it would. I actually listen and it actually would.

All the kids know all the words to his songs and Randall Coats seems really happy, and you'd think it would be weird after the
“show” is over, we're all still just here in the house, but it isn't, he just bows and takes his guitar off and hands it to a kid who wants to know about his tuning and he starts talking to kids.

Later I'm smoking weed in the backyard with some kids I've just met and granted sometimes this place seems like the scene of the crime but for a minute after passing the joint to the left everything loses its crime-scene aspect and these kids make absolute and total sense to me, and Eric and I, if we can help it, will return here one day and stay forever where Chelsea 2 makes journals she sells online and Larissa is getting her picture taken in a yellow raincoat underneath a streetlight and everybody can cook. Of course the show is in the living room and of course the bikes are in the garage and I will meet these girls and their friends and chase them through the bookstore. Eric and I will sit together in the back row of a class on poverty and if I miss a class to fool around in the top bunk of some girl's bed in a dorm Eric will have the notes and we will spend the afternoon picking apart burritos. We'll inherit this house and run a campus magazine out of it. Illustrated by Darren Bennett Written by Eric Lederer.

One day in the living room I get woken up by the drummer from Andre The Client talking on his cell phone to someone who I guess from his tone of voice is his girlfriend back home. The sliding glass patio door is a big square of light. I don't see Eric anywhere. I get up and bum around the house looking for him. While stepping over sleeping band members I think that it has been the same day for Eric since he was born, the same day since we met, the same day since he and Christine got together, the same day since I called the guy who works for The Man or who The Man works for on him, and it will be the same day when this whole thing comes to an end, reaches whatever conclusion it's going to. My phone vibrates in my pocket. I have a text from Eric reading DON'T WORRY. BAD DAY. GOING TO THE DESERT.

When he gets back I want to ask him if he can maybe see down the barrel of his one long day and tell me how this all works out. Not like I think he's psychic, but for him it's all one unbroken day,
and while I couldn't tell you what's going to happen to me twenty years from now in a span of time all broken up by sleep, I could probably tell you, based on how my day is going, how my night's going to be. And since for him it's all one unbroken day I want to hear from him how he thinks it might end.