CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In which I become a social animal at last

 

When it came time for our summer camping trip, we ended up on top of a mountain in Colorado where we teamed up for our summer fun with a couple of other families whose Daddies worked with my Daddy at his job.  Lo and behold, one of them was a girl, and her name was Jade McBean, but I call her Shade Further.

Shade Further was about to go into her freshman year at Hazing High School South, which made her a year younger than me.  We walked in the hills and talked about stuff, I don’t know what all, and let me tell you, Shade Further was the moodiest, gloomiest, most unpredictable girl I ever met before or since, so we became good friends.  I later found out through the grapevine that she had wanted me to fall in love with her, but since she might be laughing one minute and crying the next, or jabbering nonstop and then suddenly refusing to speak, with no explanation for any of it, I never did get around to actually falling in love with her.

The first thing that happened when school started up again was that I ran into Shade Further one day on the way home from school.  She was walking with a chubby and relatively cheerful friend who she introduced to me as Susan.  Now in case you never found out, what high school girls do to each other is, they find out what guy each other is in love with, and then they try to get that guy to fall in love with themself instead.  It could be that this ritual is also acted out by grown-up women, though I wouldn’t know because one of the first things I learned as an adult was to avoid groups of women larger than one.  Anyhow, after an initial period during which the three of us and some other friends of Shade Further’s would hang out in Shade Further’s Mama’s living room after school listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention albums on her family stereo, Susan made a play for me which was not anywhere near as subtle as the one Shade Further was making, which is to say that she dragged me home with her every day after school and waited for Shade Further to get pissed and go away.  But not before I’d met Shade Further’s other friends, namely, Greg “Moonshadow” Mick, Dean Freeman, Randy Anderson, David Alfred “Little Chicken” Olsen, David Robert Olsen, and Kiernan, whose real name was James Thomas Patrick Kiernan.  His Mama called him Tommy, and my Mama called him James, because neither one of them was comfortable calling him Kiernan, which is what his friends called him, although in the long run I came to call him Batanwa Jim, and that’s how I will always remember him.

But before I could get too involved with all these chumsters, I had Susan to deal with.  Since no girl had ever (to my knowledge) made a play for me before, I never considered not acting interested, although to be honest the main thing about her that attracted me was the level of interest she was showing in me, and the other thing about her that I found interesting was that she was a female.  And a very sociable one at that.  Her Mama was divorced, and she had the horniest little twelve-year-old sister I ever met, whose name was Jeannie.  We could do anything we wanted in Susan’s house after school because her Mama was either at work or if it was her day off she was at the bowling alley getting drunk.  Mainly what we did was to lounge around in Susan’s bedroom listening to Johnny Rivers records, because Susan had a crush on Johnny Rivers, and she would try to make Jeannie go away and stop sticking her hand down my shirt long enough for me to kiss her, but I didn’t know that I was supposed to kiss her, because no one had told me that this was what I was supposed to do.

When I was 10, my Mama and my Daddy had made me be in Little League one horrible summer against my will, and I learned by bitter experience that “getting to first base” was just something that I would never ever do, and no one had ever bothered to tell me any different.

Susan figured out that we could avoid Jeannie by hanging out in the church behind her house.  In those days churches were left unlocked, until I learned of this practice, and some of my consequent actions led to all churches everywhere being locked up tighter than a drum, when they were unoccupied.  But this was early in my career, so me and Susan were free to go in there to the sanctuary where all those pews were, and we would sit down on one of those pews and she would get real quiet.  It wasn’t long before I figured out that I was supposed to do something, and not knowing what that might be, I improvised by telling her the Rary Bird joke, which is an extra long joke I had learned from my freshman science teacher Uncle Gene, who would tell jokes sometimes when he hadn’t had time to read the chapter before we did, because he was really hired to be a Driver’s Ed instructor and had to teach science too because he had some time on his hands and he was not going to say no to a job.

Anyhow, after I told Susan the whole Rary Bird joke the best way I knew how, she started pouting and sulking and pretending to cry, which didn’t come as much of a shock to me because nobody else but me seemed to think the Rary Bird joke was funny either, but when she continued to sniff and mope, I realized it was time to take manly action, so I put my arm around her.

My oh my, how her attitude changed.  From then on I had my arm around her at all times.  Up to that point, walking home from school used to take forty minutes, but with my arm around that amazon it took a lot longer, and Shade Further eventually got tired of dragging along with us and found another way home.  But it wasn’t long before Susan started getting quiet again, and one night when we met surreptitiously at the public library, she was so sulky that I was afraid I would lose her, so I went outside where I thought she had run off to about twenty minutes earlier, and found her standing under a tree in the dark.  I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t think I loved her, so I figured I had no choice but to kiss her.  It was the scariest thing I ever did, but once I got it over with it wasn’t that bad.  We spent the next couple of weeks wiping our lips on each others faces and sticking our tongues in each others ears, until one day I figured she just plain didn’t like me, because there she was moping again and kissing no longer fixed her up.

Around that time, me and Susan and Shade Further were all invited to a party up on the hill at some rich people’s house, and for some reason the party was to be chaperoned by Susan’s mother.  Susan had recently been mentioning the name of a certain “Wendell,” and she even went out of her way to tell me that he was going to be at the party.  Shade Further and I got a ride to the party from Shade Further’s Mama, and Susan was already there since her Mama was chaperoning that party, and a funny thing happened when I went up to Susan and put my arm around her.  She broke away from me and walked right on over to Wendell without a word and grabbed him and they started to dance.  He was a little wimpy-looking dude with glasses and curly blond hair, about half her size, and boy was I—

And boy was I—

Relieved.  So I spent the rest of the evening standing next to David Robert Olsen, and although we couldn’t think of anything to say after our standard greeting, “How’s the wife and kids?” it was nice to have someone to stand next to, and I’m sure he felt the same way.  Finally, Shade Further came over and started dancing with me, and after about half a minute she said, You know why she dumped you?  Because you wouldn’t give her a ring.

Well I didn’t know I was supposed to give her a ring, nobody told me I was supposed to do that, and she never asked me for one.

As soon as she had passed on that information, Shade Further broke away from me, and went over to Henry the big ugly thing that couldn’t get out of his chair in the corner because he was too drunk, and plopped down on his lap and stuck her tongue down his throat, and they were still gagging on each others’ tonsils an hour and a half later when Susan’s Mama the chaperone staggered downstairs to scream at us because she had inside information that someone had brought alcohol to the party and we all knew that was against the rules, so the party was now officially over and we all had to go home.

That’s how I won and lost my first girlfriend.

But being single just served to open up my social life more, because now Shade Further’s other friends, Greg “Moonshadow” Mick, Dean Freeman, Little Chicken, and Batanwa Jim, wanted me to come home with them to Moonshadow’s house where we played basketball every day until Moonshadow would lose his temper and start practicing karate on Batanwa Jim, because the little twerp wouldn’t get serious.  Then we would go into his basement to cool off by listening to Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, and our favorite album, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung:

 

Sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent.

Snot running down his nose,

greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes . . .

 

And on and on.

We further entertained ourselves by hyperventilating and passing out, but Moonshadow was afraid to try it and Batanwa Jim couldn’t seem to get the hang of it, though he tried and tried and finally faked it, but we weren’t fooled because he couldn’t stop laughing.  Moonshadow would talk about how he got his whole family kicked out of the Philippines—where his Daddy still was because he owned a timber company there—by practicing karate on people, and then he would haul out his poetry and make me read it, then he would haul out his guitar and make me play it, and finally when I’d had my fill of socializing I’d make some excuse to head for home.

Batanwa Jim always tagged along.  Which wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’d recently read about hypnotic regression to retrieve memories of past lives, and I needed a guinea pig, so we’d go down in the basement and I’d try to hypnotize him.  He claimed that it wasn’t working, but it didn’t keep me from wanting to try.

There was this thing that Batanwa Jim did that annoyed the hell out of me.  He would pick things up at random, and fiddle with them, and then put them down in the wrong place.  I couldn’t break him of this habit, and I couldn’t make him get serious, so finally I would get tired of him and tell him he had to go home.  He ignored me as long as he could, but I’d gradually work my way upstairs and then to the front door, and finally I had no other choice but to push him out the door and lock the door behind me.  The poor wretch would stand out there beating on the door and begging me in his phony Irish brogue to let him in, and my brother Dirk would come out of his room to see what was going on, give me a funny look and go back in his room, and eventually I’d open up the door.  We went back downstairs and I bit my tongue while Batanwa Jim told me all about his screwed-up Irish Catholic family from New York City and fiddled with whatever he could get his hands on, and finally my Mama would come home and invite him to dinner.  Eventually he grew six inches taller and stopped acting like a little twerp, and I must say that, especially considering what became of him, I’m glad that I didn’t push him out of my life.

One evening Shade Further and the rest of us had a little get-together to celebrate Moonshadow’s birthday, but what we really wanted to do was to have a seance.  So there we were, sitting on the floor, holding hands in the dark, waiting for something to happen after having invited the spirits to attend, when the candle in the middle of the circle went out all by itself and Moonshadow started moaning and thrashing around.  Cool, I thought, it’s working.  But twenty minutes later, he was still moaning and thrashing around, even after the circle broke up and the lights were turned on.  Shade Further was crying and whimpering that we’d driven him off the deep end, and Randy Anderson suggested that we knock him out by beating on his head with our fists before he got himself hurt thrashing around like that, but Dean Freeman was the one with the car, and he decided to take him home, and I was sure I’d be visiting Moonshadow in the nuthouse every Saturday for the rest of my life.  We eventually managed to get him home, and Dean Freeman snuck him in the back door of his house and rolled him down the stairs into his room in the basement.

The next day Moonshadow was in school and back to normal, except that he didn’t remember a thing from the night before.  I told him I wanted to hypnotize him after school and make him remember what had happened.  He wasn’t so sure that would be a good idea, but I kept whining till he agreed to let me try.

We sat down in his bedroom and I started counting to twenty, explaining that he was going into a deep hypnotic trance with each succeeding number, and by the time I reached twenty, he was slumped over and his face was a blank mask and I said, Now go back to the seance last night and tell me what you see.

It took him a long time to answer, and when he did, he seemed lethargic and barely able to mumble.  After much questioning, Moonshadow’s story finally came out, one mumble at a time.  It seems that he had been invaded by dark, shadowy spirits who wanted to get into his body and take control of him.  He fought them and finally drove them out, and that was about it.

I was thrilled.  I counted him back up out of the trance after letting him know that from now on, anytime I or anybody else wanted to hypnotize him, all they had to do was to count to twenty and he would be in a deep trance.

I told him what had happened, since he remembered nothing past the number four, and it was obvious that he was a somnambulist, or someone who easily goes into a deep trance at the slightest suggestion that he do so.  He didn’t like being hypnotized, because he couldn’t remember what happened while he was out, but I assured him that I wouldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, and he let me try a few more times.  Sure enough, all I had to do was count to twenty and he’d turn into a statue.  But after awhile he started complaining that he would wake up in the middle of the night not knowing who or where he was, and the experiment ended when he refused to be hypnotized anymore because he went into a trance in his math class one time when the teacher was counting out loud.

Moonshadow had a cousin who was trying to sell some marijuana, and Moonshadow wanted to get some of it and make a whole bunch of money selling it.  I didn’t want anything to do with it, having been inundated in my freshman health class with anti-drug movies about people going crazy and getting taken to the hospital screaming and getting hooked on hard drugs, all because they let some friend talk them into taking a puff off a joint.

One night, me and Moonshadow and Shade Further and Susan and Moonshadow’s ex-girlfriend, Susan’s twelve-year old sister Jeannie, who was mad at Moonshadow for breaking up with her, were all at a football game roaming around soaking up the excitement while ignoring the game, when Moonshadow took me aside and told me that we had to go hang out by the front gate and wait for someone he was supposed to meet there.  He told me he had a big bag of marijuana stuffed in his pants, and he was going to sell it to this person who was supposed to show up.  So we went over to the fence and sat down on the grass, and were leaning up against the fence minding our own business when I saw that vicious little Jeannie talking to a man who looked like a plainclothes police officer, and pointing right at us.  I had the urge to disappear real fast, but couldn’t desert my friend, so I just sat there hoping it was all my imagination as the man and another man walked over to us.

They showed us their badges and asked us in a very nice way to get up and come with them, and as they escorted us to their car in the parking lot, I saw Shade Further and Susan getting hysterical over by the bleachers.  The nice men got in the front seat of their unmarked police car, after letting us into the back seat, and I knew my life was over.  They got our names, phone numbers and addresses, and then told us that someone claimed we were selling marijuana, and wanted to know if this was true.  Neither of us said anything for the longest time, until they started asking us if we wanted to go to jail, and then Moonshadow told them that he didn’t want me to get in trouble because I had nothing to do with it, and pulled the baggie out of his pants.  The cops said it was the biggest bag of marijuana that had ever been taken off a fourteen-year-old in the whole history of Haze County.

They let me go, and Shade Further and Susan were all over me, boo-hooing and slobbering on my neck.  We wandered around for awhile till Susan left to go find her little sister Jeannie and kick her ass for being a snitch.  I put my arm around Shade Further and we walked to her house real slow, feeling bigger than life, like characters in a movie.  David Robert Olsen rode over on his bicycle and helped comfort Shade Further, and finally I got up the nerve to go home and face the music.  I assumed that by now my Mama and my Daddy had gotten a call from the police department, and I had my little speech well-rehearsed by the time I got there.

They were in their bed reading, and stupid me, before they could say, How was the game, I jumped right in and told them I didn’t do anything, and asked them what the police had said.

This was the first they’d heard of it, so I had to start from the beginning and tell them the whole gruesome tale of how my friend Moonshadow’s life was over at the age of 14 from trying to sell drugs at a football game, and I had gotten dragged into it through no fault of my own.  After the story was told, my Mama and my Daddy told me I couldn’t see Moonshadow any more, and they had one question:  Did you smoke any?

No, I never have, and never want to, and never will, I’ve never even seen any, all I saw was a baggie in the dark police car when Moonshadow pulled it out of his pants, and I don’t think he smoked any either.

I don’t think they even began to believe me, but they pretended to, since they didn’t want to call me a liar till they had more evidence, which they forthwith proceeded to invent in a gradual process over the next few years of convincing themselves that I was smoking dope with my friends and nothing I said could change their minds.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, and the doubts and fears that I’d sensed hiding in the back of my Mama’s and Daddy’s voices wormed into my empty shell like a dark, shadowy spirit, and from that day I had a little thing growing in me that knew I was born to fulfill my Mama’s and my Daddy’s darkest expectations.

A couple days later I was out in the front yard pretending to rake leaves when Moonshadow drove by on his bicycle.  He saw me and screeched to a stop.  He told me that the cops had let him go right away, because as soon as they got him to the jail and looked at his baggie in the light, it became obvious that the contents of the baggie were a combination of parsley, mint, and pencil shavings.

That was my first experience with drugs.