“Plenty of hot girls are virgins, Hun,” I say.
“Not that girl,” he tells me. “That’s a girl who likes to neuken.”
“Neuken?”
“It’s Dutch, I think.”
That’s where the name came from. “So you’re Dutch?”
He frowns. “No.”
I sigh. “Riot Grrl is a made-up girl, okay? I wrote her. And I wrote her as a virgin.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You’re still watching the show, aren’t you?”
He blinks slowly, breathing heavily through his mouth. He’s thinking about this. Or he’s having a petit mal seizure; hard to tell.
Joe slides into the seat next to me. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say.
He opens a book and starts leafing through it. I wait for him to say something about the new episode. He keeps leafing. It’s a Bible.
“How’s the book?”
“Interesting,” he says. “You ever read it?”
“Parts. In Sunday school. Years ago.”
“I think it’s interesting.”
“Okay.”
“Really. Did you know there are two creation stories?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, there are. Nobody talks about that.”
“Why would they?” I say.
He just looks at me. His eyes are huge and expressionless, like a bug’s. You never know what he’s thinking unless he wants you to. Mostly, he doesn’t want you to.
“Did you see the new episode?”
“Yeah, I caught it,” he says.
“The show rocks,” Attila the Hun pipes up.
“Thanks,” Joe says, as if he had something to do with it.
“You should have stayed,” I say. “Helped us do the edits.”
Joe keeps leafing, the thin pages making an impatient rustling sound. “I told you. I had a history project. You did okay without me.”
I know what this is about. He’s mad because we used the Gina footage without asking. “Gina loved the episode.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I just talked to her.”
His bug eyes bug. “Would it have killed you to get her permission first?”
“Yes,” I say. “It would actually have killed me. My liver would have exploded. Or my pancreas.”
Attila the Hun: “What’s the pancreas do?”
Joe doesn’t even glance back at him. “Secretes insulin.”
“Anyway,” I say, “it all worked out for the best. The show’s number three.”
“Hmmm,” he says.
“Would it kill you to show more enthusiasm?”
There’s a carved pumpkin smile. “Yes, it would actually kill me.”
Attila the Hun: “I still don’t get why she’s a virgin.”
“Who?” says Joe.
“Riot Grrl,” I say. “He’s having a little trouble with the whole make-believe thing.”
Attila the Hun: “Wouldn’t it be better if she had sex all the time?”
“How would that be different than porn, Hun?” I say.
“And don’t you find enough of that on the web already?” says Joe.
“No.” Attila the Hun laughs. If dogs could laugh, they would sound like Attila the Hun. I wonder what Attila the Hun thinks of Crime and Prejudice. His papers must be pretty entertaining to read.
“We have to work on the rehearsal schedule,” I tell Joe. “I have the script almost done.”
“Don’t we always have the same rehearsal schedule?”
I decide that I’m not going to get much more out of him. Maybe all his Bible reading will teach him a little forgiveness and maybe some gratitude, too. Then again, all the books on Buddhism didn’t help him achieve true enlightenment. And the Marx didn’t help him understand the common man. Neither did all that stuff about Plato. Which reminds me…
“How’d did the history project go?”
“Good,” Joe says. “Really good. We’re almost done.”
“Who’s in your study group?”
He shrugs. “A few people. Max Blume. Ashley Davidson. Lucinda Dulko. That’s who picked me up. Lucinda.” As he says her name, his mouth moves oddly, like he almost can’t get the word out, like he’s stuck on the Lu and might have to sing the rest. A flush of pink tinges his ears and he ducks his head a little.
It’s been a long time since a girl made him give himself away like that. The last one was Joelle Lipshitz, and she chewed him up and spit him out last summer, right before she left for acting school and a role in a tampon commercial.
Oddly, this makes me feel better. Like Joe’s human after all. And that maybe I’m not so stupid for asking Lucinda Dulko to play.
Mr. Lambright, the teacher, strides into the room just as the bell is ringing. “All right, people. Settle down. Today we’re going to talk about…”
I take out a piece of paper and scribble a note. When Lambright turns around to write something on the board, I toss it on Joe’s desk. Joe reads the note, answers it, and tosses it back.
I wrote: So, are we cool? Can we get back to it now?
He wrote: We’re cool.
I look at the note, at Joe’s pink ears. I hear him trying to say her name through a mouth that seemed to belong to someone else. I remember the feel of my own mouth stretching into a stupid grin in the glare of Lucinda’s headlights.
Yeah.
We’re real cool.
I don’t know why, but a line from This Is Spinal Tap pops into my head: “We’ve got armadillos in our trousers. It’s really quite frightening.”
Disturbia
After school, I drive to the pet store to stock up on Polly’s Extreme Tropical Fruit and Nut Bites and Sassy and Sleek Bird Kibble for Tippi Hedren. I find her hanging upside down in her cage, gnawing maniacally on her wooden “robot” toy. The poor guy is now missing his head, a head that Tippi has dropped strategically in one of her food bowls.
“You’re a man-eater, Tippi,” I say. I open the cage and she steps out onto my finger. I’ll replace the toy with another one later. She goes through them like a cheerleader through football players.
“Long yellow?” she says as I reach back in the cage for her bowls.
“I didn’t buy any corn on the cob today. But I have your favorite fruit and nut bites.”
“Long yellow.”
“I’ll get you some tomorrow.”
“Long yellow!”
“You ladies are so demanding.”
“I’m just a wild animal you’ve trapped,” Tippi Hedren says, ruffling her feathers.
“Yes, you are. But you’re my favorite wild animal.”
Tippi purrs happily on my shoulder—she does a mean cat impression, along with ringing phones, sirens, static, and asthmatic wheezing—I strip out the paper lining the bottom of the cage and replace it with clean paper. I remove her bowls, go to the bathroom, wash both, fill them up with food, and put them back in the cage. After I’m done cleaning, I take a handful of the nuts and seeds and then me and Tippi sit at my computer. There’s an instant message from Gina: Karma, ass face. What goes around comes around. I totally hate you. What time is rehearsal? I tell her to come over at four the next day, as usual.
I feed Tippi some sunflower seeds and click over to the MTV site. We’re still number three in votes. Ahead of Riot Grrl 16 is a show called The Amazing Adventures of Emo Guy, which is a sort of funny animated show. I don’t have any animation skills, and this makes me laugh once in a while, so I don’t mind so much. But the other show is an unbelievably bad jackass-type show in which a bunch of guys try to launch themselves out of cannons or shoot potato guns at each other’s crotches or have cavities drilled without novocaine. Their most recent episode consists of them eating as many Mentos as they can and then drinking a vat of Pepsi. Projectile vomiting ensues. Truly inspiring.
Sometimes I fear for the future of America.
And then sometimes I don’t. I page through more com
ments about Riot Grrl 16. Most of it’s the same as before. Rock on, Riot Grrl, I love this show. As much as it hurts I think riot grrl needs to stop helping her brother he’s just dragging her down.
I’m feeling really good about our chances, especially good now that I know Gina’s not going anywhere, and maybe Joe will hang around too, when I see that the Tin Man has struck again.
I can’t believe you guys are still talking about this show. It’s lame, lame, LAME. You can tell that chick is no more punk than the nearest mall rat. I bet those tattoos are stick-ons. I bet she just went to a Justin Timberlake concert wearing a thong hanging out of the back of her Juicy jeans. And the guy playing her brother has about as much charisma as a corpse. Where’d they find him? The morgue?
“What’s wrong with this guy?” I say out loud.
“I have to get back to San Francisco,” says Tippi Hedren.
And right after the Tin Man post, there’s another one from someone else. never thought about it but now that you said it i guess except for the hair and the tattoos there’s nothing punk about her really maybe she’s just a wannabe like those girls who shop at hot topic
“These people are insane,” I say. Tippi helpfully does her impression of a cuckoo clock.
I find another negative from a third person:
I don’t like the brother either. He’s creepy.
“He’s supposed to be creepy!” I shout. “He’s a heroin addict!”
Tin Man adds: And do I have to mention YET AGAIN that this is nothing but a total rip-off of Lonely Girl 15? And that show isn’t even GOOD????
“Great, Tippi. This dumb ass is going to poison the voting pool.”
“I jumped in the fountain!” says Tippi. “Meow!”
“I’d like for this guy to go jump in the fountain,” I say. I click on Comment and start to type, but then I think better of it and consult the dictionary first.
Satire: the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
Duh.
“Duh,” I say.
Tippi Hedren says, “I think you need these lovebirds after all. They may help your personality.” She growls like a lion, and I give her another small handful of seeds.
I click over to the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine MySpace. Not a lot of comments there but a few desperate groupies who call themselves “hott” trying to be our “friends.” Like Rory always says, their parents would be so proud. I friend them all anyway. “You can’t have too many friends, right, Tippi?”
“I have to get back to San Francisco,” Tippi says.
I click out of MySpace and flip to my Riot Grrl script. We have only four episodes left, and I want to make sure everything is leading to a big finale. That I haven’t thought of yet. We’ve already had Riot Grrl get together with her manga-obsessed crush, break up with her manga-obsessed crush, try out for American Idol, become a Wiccan, attempt to cast love spells with dead ants and cinnamon, rescue her best friend from a fifty-four-year-old freak she met on the internet, and deal with her long-lost drug addict brother. I’m thinking that the one commenter was right: Riot Grrl has to cut her addict brother loose. She can’t cover for him anymore; she can’t slip him cash; she can’t keep lying to her parents that he’s still in the rehab clinic they spent their life savings to send him to. She knows it has to be done, but it’s going to break her heart to do it. It might send her over the edge; I don’t know. That could be interesting. Riot Grrl goes over the edge? What would that look like?
I’m writing for a while when the floor under me vibrates. The garage. I hear a car door slam. And then my name. I take Tippi and head downstairs.
My dad’s holding a hammer and sighing. His sighs are long and expressive. So are his eye rolls. He’s worse than a teenager.
“I was going to use this and I noticed that it’s broken. Did you break my hammer?”
“It’s not broken,” I say.
He points to the handle. “It’s cracked. You cracked my hammer.”
“Gina cracked your hammer.”
“How did she do that?”
“She threw a bottle at me and missed. It must have hit the hammer.”
“Okay,” he says. “Why would she do that?”
“How should I know? She’s crazy.”
He raises his eyebrows. They’re expressive too. “Women can be that way, if you give them enough reason.”
“And sometimes they’re crazy all on their own,” I say.
“So you didn’t give her a reason.”
“I’m just a wild animal,” Tippi says.
“Hello, Tippi Hedren,” Dad says. “Beautiful as ever, I see.” He winks at her and she winks back. The first trick I ever taught her. She makes a sound somewhere between a giggle and a cackle.
“You’ll have to pay to replace the hammer,” he tells me. “I liked that hammer.”
“Fine,” I say, hoping that the rest of his tools are undamaged from Gina’s rampage. “You’re home early.” Dad doesn’t normally walk in till one or two in the morning. Sometimes I don’t see him for days. I get the feeling I’m not supposed to care about this; I’m supposed to like it. Not sure what it means that I don’t.
“We wrapped up early for once,” my dad’s saying. “You’d think my schedule would have turned you off the movie business.”
“You’re not in the movie business.”
“I’m in show business.”
I’m about to say, I don’t think doing the sound for a cable TV show called Cleaning House in which middle-aged people have massive amounts of junk cleaned out of their houses by some annoying Australian guy qualifies as show business. But all I say is, “Dad.”
He smiles in that aggravating way he has, that way that says he’s been there, done that, seen everything, and wasn’t impressed. “I know, I know, doing the sound for Cleaning House doesn’t count, right?”
“Dad.”
“Depends what you think show business is supposed to do. Entertain people? Help people? Most of show business doesn’t do either.”
Tippi Hedren says, “You Freud, me Jane?”
“I didn’t say anything,” I protest.
“This week we went to see this couple downstate,” he says. “I’ve never even heard of the town. Seems crazy to me that there are towns in New Jersey I’ve never heard of, but there it is. Anyway, this couple lives in a tiny house with two kids. You can’t even get into the house, it’s so jammed with stuff. You know what kind of stuff?”
He’s waiting for me to guess.
“Car tires.”
“No.”
“Encyclopedias.”
“No.”
“Hair clippings.”
“No, but that would be funny. He collects Barbies. Works for the company that makes them. Anyway, whenever the company offers the fancy expensive Barbies for sale, the ones dressed up like Princess Diana or Paris Hilton or Cinderella or whoever, he buys them because he thinks they’re going to be worth something someday. Had hundreds in unopened boxes stacked everywhere. Not one was made before 1985, and not one of them was rare. Which means that they aren’t worth a dime and never will be. Couldn’t tell him that, though. Here his kids had nowhere to sit, but he cried when we told him he’d have to get rid of his Barbies.”
I hunt around for a broom. “That’s a very sad story.”
“Well, there are very sad people in the world. Wally did get him to sell about half of them at the garage sale. Your mother probably could have talked him into selling them all.”
“Probably.” My dad and mom met while working at the same cable channel—he was a sound guy and she was a hostess for a design show. Then they both switched over to Cleaning House. They worked there until Villerosa. Villerosa changed everything.
Dad examines the broken hammer. “I don’t see why you can’t go to school to study film,” he says. Doesn’t bother with segues, my dad. Besides, this has been his favorite topic since the beginning of the school year,
when I told him that I wasn’t going to college.
“I have been studying film for years,” I say.
“I mean really study it.”
“I’ve been really studying it. Since I was a kid. The workshops? The camps? The classes? Ringing a bell?”
He picks up the rest of the tools on the floor and hangs them neatly on the wall, making sure they’re completely parallel. “I’m not sure your mother did you a favor taking you to all of that stuff. And that was a long time ago.”
I’m so tired of this.
“Success doesn’t just happen. There’s apprenticeship. There’s practice.”
“Dad, I’m working as hard as I can.”
“Really? When was the last time you mowed the lawn?”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Sure you will. There’s also maturity. Talent needs to be developed over time.”
“Orson Welles was in his twenties when he did Citizen Kane,” I say.
“He was twenty-six. Eight years older than you.”
“That’s just an example. I don’t expect to be Orson Welles. At least not yet. I just want to make movies. Isn’t making movies the best way to learn how to make them?”
“I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Even though I put as much sarcasm in my voice as I can, he doesn’t seem to register it. “Oh, I have all the confidence in the world that you’ll be successful. Absolutely. I’m not sure you’re going to be successful tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day. Just be prepared for that.”
“Again, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he says. “Understand, though, that you’ll be getting a job as soon as September comes around.”
“I have a job. My movies are my job.”
“A paying job.”
“Mom gives me an allowance.” I put the emphasis on the word Mom.
He doesn’t bite. “You’re eighteen years old, Eddy. You need to earn your own money.”
“The movies will pay.”
And there it is, the smile, the resigned, the patient, the all-knowing, all-seeing, you’ll-learn-your-lesson-eventually smile. Makes me want to break a hundred more hammers.