“I don’t know,” I said. “Better than shitty and scared all the time.”
“Don’t be dumb, Austin,” Robby said.
Robby unscrewed the cap on the wine. I watched him swallow. He liked it.
“Well, I’m taking one anyway,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Robby said.
Robby would not take one. He looked unhappy when I put the tiny blue pill on my tongue. But it was something I always wondered about. I hoped my mother’s little kayak would help me figure things out.
Get things to fall right into place.
I washed it down with some wine.
The wine tasted sweet, and it burned at the same time.
Robby kept the grimacing lemur mask and the plastic yard flamingo in his bedroom. I tried the lemur mask on. It did make my face stink, and the lenses in the eyes made everything look strange. There was some kind of refractive prism on the lenses of the mask that made Robby look blue. I took it off.
“Yes,” I confirmed, “now my face really does stink.”
“I told you,” Robby said. “Did that Xanax do anything to you?”
“Uh. I don’t think so,” I said. “But it’s only been a minute.”
I picked up the flamingo. I shook it.
“What are you doing?” Robby said.
“Shaking the plastic lawn flamingo,” I explained.
“Why?” Robby asked.
“I want to see if candy will come out of its ass,” I answered.
Maybe I was starting to feel different.
We shared more wine. We drank straight from the bottle. I was kind of messy. The wine ran down my neck. It baptized Saint Kazimierz. But it also made my face not stink so bad.
“Maybe the message was about this flamingo,” I said.
I was somewhat impressed by my brilliance.
“Uh,” Robby said.
Robby wasn’t really paying attention. He opened up his record player and was flipping through a bookcase of vinyl LPs that used to belong to his dad.
“Yeah,” I went on, “maybe it’s like a smoke detector for that shit in the globe Tyler dropped. McKeon Industries did used to make Pulse-O-Matic® brand smoke detectors.”
“I think you’re high, Porcupine,” Robby said.
He shook his head and carefully grooved the stylus onto the edge of the spinning record.
I don’t know exactly what the Xanax did to me. All I can remember is how relaxed and not-uptight I felt. I did not care about anything.
Everything was nice, very nice.
As I sat there on the corner of Robby’s bed, I was aware that nothing at all mattered anymore, and I wasn’t confused about feeling happy.
I was floating away.
We finally could forget about everything.
Robby played a crackling vinyl recording of Exile on Main Street, and we got drunk on screw-top wine and smoked cigarettes and took off our T-shirts.
I opened my notebook and drew sketches of Robby as he reclined, bare chested, on the floor in the slate-colored streetlight that came through the apartment’s open window.
It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.
The music sounded better than anything I’d ever heard.
I had never been so happy in my life.
I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.
I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.
And Mick Jagger sang to us:
Tryin’ to stop the waves behind your eyeballs,
Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues.
PAGES FROM HISTORY
IN THE MORNING, Robby’s alarm clock buzzed like an air-raid warning.
We had to get up to go to school.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying next to Robby on his bed. My arm stretched across the space between us, and my open hand lay flat in the middle of Robby’s chest. I had my legs pressed up against his leg. One of my feet was completely underneath Robby’s calf.
The covers of Robby’s bed had been thrown down on the floor around his footboard, and we were sprawled out on top of the bottom sheet.
At that moment, all I had on were some boxers, my left sock, and the silver chain Johnny McKeon gave me with Saint Kazimierz on it around my neck.
I sat up, still drunk and woozy from the pill.
I felt drained and rushed, like my brain had just flushed itself down the toilet of my throat.
I was vaguely aware that Robby sat up in the bed. He turned off his alarm and watched me while I rolled my legs over the edge of his bed. It was all I could do to will myself not to vomit until I staggered and tripped in my drooping boxers out of Robby’s bedroom.
I needed to find the toilet.
Robby’s favorite poem is Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. It is a poem about war and lies, youth and thievery.
It begins:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.
Robby has very good taste for words.
My favorite poem is The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens. It is a poem about everything else: sex, lust, pleasure, loneliness, and death.
It begins:
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Robby recited his poem from memory that night, and I fumbled over some of the last lines in my poem, but finally got it right.
They were both so beautiful, and their sound, as we said them to each other above the music, made our chests fill up with something electric and buzzing, like love and magic.
When I finished throwing up, I flushed the toilet and turned on Robby’s shower.
I dropped my orphaned sock and Iowa plaid boxers onto the floor below the sink. I climbed into the tub and got under the water.
It was cold, and there was a grimy ring of brown that had accumulated around the bottom of Robby’s bathtub. The apartment had only the one bathroom. It was right in the middle of a T-shaped hallway that separated Robby’s bedroom from his mother’s.
Connie Brees was not home from work yet.
I put my face under the water. I felt terrible. My eyes blurred and I fingered the medal of Saint Kazimierz and looked at his modest eyes and little upside-down halo. I put the thing in my mouth.
I heard the bathroom door open.
Robby said, “Austin? Are you okay, Austin?”
“I’m okay,” I said. There was an edge in my voice.
And I said, “Can you just let me have five minutes, Robby? Okay?”
Robby said, “Sure. I brought your school clothes in for you.”
Robby was sad because I was being an asshole.
I did not want to go to school.
I never wanted to get out of that dirty shower.
I did not want to look at Robby Brees.
I said, “Okay. Thank you.”
But I said it in such a tone that it meant: Get out of here and leave me alone.
At exactly that moment, Shann was eating a toasted bagel and looking at a black-and-white photograph of the McKeon House.
And while I was standing under the shower in Robby’s apartment, Travis Pope passed out behind the wheel of his Nissan truck and crashed into a shallow drainage ditch on the practice fields at Herbert Hoover High School. His wife, Eileen, was sitting beside him. She was not wearing her seat belt. They were hatching.
Someone down the hall from Robby’s apartment at the Del Vista Arms was holding a torch lighter below a glass pipe and cooking methamphetamine smoke into his face.
Ollie Jungfrau was finally taking a shit. He
was going to be late for work.
Johnny McKeon was driving to the Ealing Mall. He was in a good mood. Johnny was always in a good mood.
Ah Wong Sing was looking at video from a porn site in the Netherlands. He was going to be late for work.
I was combing Robby’s conditioner with my fingers through my hair. It smelled like bubble gum.
My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, was on his way to a hospital in Germany. He had lost both of his testicles and his right leg from the knee down. Two other boys died in the same explosion. We would not learn this until the following day.
Robby Brees was in his underwear, sitting on his bed. He put his face into his palms and cried.
SCHOOL PRAYERS
EVERYTHING FELL INTO place, all right.
But things dropped so hard the entire world broke.
I learned this:
My mother’s little blue kayaks were perfectly seaworthy. Her Xanax did make me feel not stressed out. They took away my confusion and worry. They made me believe that I only had one head on my shoulders, and that head had everything all figured out. Everything is nicely, sweetly normal when you are floating on the kayak.
But I would need to take them forever if I wanted things to stay that way.
There was one Xanax left.
It was inside the matching, clean gray Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy regular boys’ socks Robby carried into the bathroom for me while I was under the shower.
I flushed it down the toilet with the last of my vomit.
While Robby showered, I quietly left his apartment at the Del Vista Arms. I counted three yellow Pay or Quit notices taped to doors on Robby’s floor. I walked to Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy alone.
I was not late to class.
I did not say anything to Robby.
Every morning began with a prayer. Robby came in to class. He was almost tardy for the first time in his life. He was flustered and his cheeks were red. Robby’s tie was crooked and his shirttail hung down in back of his sweater like he’d been running. He’d obviously been looking for me. Robby would have to fix his appearance or Pastor Roland Duff would call him in for counseling about proper grooming for Lutheran boys.
I prayed with the other students in the classroom, but I only thought about Robby Brees and the chain around my neck.
I did not talk to Robby for days after that.
I needed to talk to my father.
I did not have any idea what I would say.
I told Shann I was sick.
She thought it was from drinking wine with Robby the night before. That may have been true. I had no way of figuring out if anything was true or not true on that Tuesday after I spent the night with Robby.
So I told her we would have to go searching for her invisible silo after school on Wednesday. I needed to go home and let Ingrid out and then go to bed and shit like that, I told her. Shann understood.
It was already getting too late to do anything about the entire world falling off the cliff that opened at our feet in Grasshopper Jungle. All I could think about was how the pull of gravity was screwing with one particular Polish kid from Ealing, Iowa.
Shann said, “I think you’re both hung over. Robby looks sicker than you.”
“Uh,” I said.
“I hope this teaches you something,” Shann scolded.
“So do I,” I said.
“Tell Robby to come over tomorrow,” Shann said.
“Uh. Robby can do whatever he wants.”
Shann and I walked out of Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy at the end of the day. Robby had already gone home without saying anything to either one of us.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
It was the truth.
Shann repeated her history lesson for the day: “I hope you learned your lesson, is all I can say.”
“I’m sorry, Shann,” I said. Then I added, “I love you, Shann.”
Shann looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to us.
We were alone.
She pressed up against me. It was a very daring move for a pair of Lutheran kids in eyeshot of the front doors of Curtis Crane.
For some reason, the medallion of Saint Kazimierz seemed to get heavy and burn against my bare chest. And I thought about Robby again.
Shann whispered, “I love you, Austin.”
I rubbed my hips into her. I had to say it: “Shann, do you think . . . Um. Maybe . . . if I got some condoms . . .”
She cut me off. “No! Go home, Austin Szerba. You’re sick. You’re not even thinking like a normal boy.”
I thought that was what normal boys did think about.
I tried to prove something, but my experiment failed.
“Sorry, Shann. Um. Are you sure?”
She said, “Can you for one moment stop being silly, Austin?”
She said moment again. I was horny, and scared, and so confused about everything.
“I will,” I said. “I need to go lie down. I’m sorry.”
I was not thinking like a normal boy.
What was I going to do?
THE VICE PRESIDENT’S BALLS
SOME NIGHTS MY mother stayed at work at the Hy-Vee until late, so my dad and I would have to prepare dinner for ourselves.
There was once a time when it was against the law in Iowa for women to allow boys and dads to cook dinner for themselves.
Now, kids like Robby Brees and me often had to survive on our wits and by eating shit like Cup-O-Noodles and Doritos.
Most of all, I wanted to go to bed and mope, but that evening I cooked fish sticks and frozen french fries for my dad. I waited for him to come home from school, so we could talk.
The fish in the sticks claimed to come from Alaska.
The fries were not from France. The package said they were grown in Oregon and Idaho.
If there’s one thing America can do well, it’s freeze shit.
I waited.
I was nearly asleep with my head on the table when my father came in.
“You stayed up too late with Robby last night, didn’t you?” my father, whose name was Eric, said.
“Uh,” I answered. I picked my head up and rubbed my eyes.
I was still wearing my Lutheran Boy tie and sweater.
For the first time I realized I’d left my sleeping bag, underwear, socks, toothbrush, sneakers, and cell phone in Robby’s bedroom. At least I had the foresight to stuff my history notebooks into my Lutheran Boy school backpack.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I’m not feeling well, Dad.”
My father sat at the table and began eating. I got up and went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of ketchup. My dad was a ketchup man. Not me.
The ketchup was made in Nebraska.
So they do something there, after all.
I watched him.
He ate.
I was getting ready to say something. I just needed to know what words to start with.
My dad said, “Is something wrong, Austin?”
“Uh,” I said. I was determined to do it. So I said, “Dad, when you were about my age . . . Did you ever . . . Um . . . experience a . . . I mean, did you ever get a . . . have guy friends who you . . . Um . . . did you ever experiment with another . . . Um . . .”
It was a mess.
That is exactly how it came out.
My father stopped chewing. Fish sticks are not things that require any degree of jaw strength.
I wished my brother, Eric, was still at home.
He had been gone so long that it was as though I were an only child. Having a brother there would help. Eric was someone I could have talked to about things like erections and sex and making mistakes and accidental spills and bein
g confused and all that kind of shit.
At exactly that moment, Eric Christopher Szerba was in a morphine-induced coma.
As I sat there nervously watching my father, there was a small earthquake in Guatemala. Robert Brees Sr. was sleeping naked in a queen-sized bed with his new Guatemalan wife. Her name was Greta. Robert Brees Sr.’s two-year-old son, whose name was Hector, was lying on Robert’s chest. In the sky above them, hot ash from a volcano named Huacamochtli began billowing soundlessly into the atmosphere.
And at that precise moment, there were three bugs in Ealing, Iowa: Hungry Jack, Travis Pope, and Travis’s wife, Eileen. They all wanted to do only two things.
The four Hoover Boys had not yet hatched. They were sick. Young people don’t break down as fast.
Robby Brees was lying in his bed at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments. He was wearing my T-shirt and the boxers that I’d taken off and dropped on his bathroom floor. Robby was listening to the Rolling Stones.
Shann Collins was writing in a diary she kept locked in the nightstand beside her bed. She theorized how she might get away with her wish to have sex with her boyfriend, who sensitively promised her he would use a condom.
When my father and mother did learn about what happened to Eric, they left Iowa and flew to the military hospital in Germany where my brother was undergoing treatment. At first, they tried to arrange for me to stay at the Del Vista Arms with Robby and his mother. I begged them to leave me home alone because I was old enough, and somebody needed to let Ingrid out to shit, after all.
It was really only that I was afraid to face Robby Brees. I knew I would have to face him eventually, but I did not want to do it yet.
My parents would not take me with them.
They said I should stay in school, and they would call me twice per day.
When Eric Christopher Szerba was recovering from his wounds, the vice president of the United States of America came to the hospital and visited him.
The vice president was from Delaware.
I never knew anyone who’d even been to Delaware.
The vice president of the United States of America took a shit that day in the men’s toilet of the cafeteria at the military hospital before visiting my brother’s room. The vice president of the United States of America had two testicles that he liked very much, and neither one of his legs had been blown off.