I just stared at him. Now it was his turn to laugh at me, but he didn’t bust up laughing like I did, he just chuckled. “Actually,” he said, “I’m impressed by what you’ve started. It shows a level of compassion I rarely see around here.”
“So ... you want me to write you up a contract?”
“For me, and for the secretaries in the front office—and for Mr. Bale.”
“The security guard wants to give a month, too?”
“You’ve started a schoolwide phenomenon, Anthony. That poor boy is lucky to have a friend like you.”
He gave me a list of names to write contracts up for, and I was a little too shell-shocked to say much more. Then, just before I left, I looked into the trash can. “Keep that tie,” I told him. “Throw away the yellow paisley one. That’s the one everyone makes fun of.”
He looked at me like I had just given him an early Christmas gift. “Thank you, Anthony! Thank you for letting me know.”
I left with a list of five names, and the strange, unearthly feeling that comes from knowing your principal doesn’t hate your guts.
Following up on his schoolwide-phenomenon speech to me, Principal Sinclair insisted that I go on Morning Announcements, to make the whole donated-month thing legitimate school business.
Morning Announcements are kind of a joke at our school. I mean, we got all this video equipment, right, but no one knows how to use it. There’s an anchor girl who reads cue cards like she’s still stuck in the second level of Hooked on Phonics. And let’s not forget the kid who has the nervous habit of adjusting himself on-air whenever he’s nervous—which is whenever he’s on-air. Occasionally Ira would submit a funny video, but lately there hasn’t been much worth watching.
“Just read your lines off the cue cards,” the video techie told me, but like I said, public speaking ranks right up there with being eaten alive by ants on my list of unpleasant activities.
After doing my own morning announcement, I now know firsthand why those other kids look like idiots on TV, and I have new respect for Crotch Boy and Phonics Girl.
“Hello, I’m Anthony Bonano with news for you. As many of you know, our friend Gunnar Ümlaut has been diagnosed with PMS, which is a rare life-threatening disease, pause, so I’m asking you, point at camera, to open up your hearts and donate a month of your life as a symbolic gesture, to show Gunnar that we really care. And in return, you’ll get a T-shirt that says ‛Gunnar’s Time Warriors.’ Really? There’s a T-shirt? Cool! Our goal is to collect as much time as possible. Remember, ‛Don’t be a dunth. Donate a month.’ Now excuse me while I go beat the crap out of whoever wrote that. Did I just say crap on live TV?”
Crotch Boy, Phonics Girl, and now the Blithering Wonder.
It began even before I went to my next class. I was grabbed in the hallway by people who didn’t seem to care how moronic I looked on TV. They all wanted to make time donations. Everyone had their own reason for it. One guy did it to impress his girlfriend. One girl hoped it would get her into the popular crowd. Although I didn’t want to spend all my free time at my computer printing out time contracts, I couldn’t just walk away from what I had started, could I? Besides—there was a kind of power to being the go-to guy. The Master of Time. I even felt like I should start dressing for the part, you know? Like wearing a shirt and tie, the way the basketball team does on the day of a big game. So I found this tie covered with weird melting clocks designed by some dead artist named Dolly. Okay, I admit it, this was really starting to go to my head—like when Wendell Tiggor said he wanted to donate some time.
“You can’t,” I told him, “on account of Gunnar needs life, not wastes-of-life.”
The thing is, Tiggor’s famous for having really lame comeback lines, like, “Oh yeah? If I’m a waste of life, then you’re a stupid stupidhead.” (Sometimes the person he was insulting would have to feed him a decent comeback line out of pity.)
This time, however, Tiggor didn’t even try. He just pouted and slumped away. Why? Because the Master of Time had spoken, and he was deemed unworthy.
What happened next, well, I guess I could blame it on Skaterdud, but it’s not his fault—not really. I blame it on Restless Recipe syndrome. That’s something my father once taught me.
It was a month or so before the restaurant first opened, and he was trying to figure out what the official menu would be. It was the first time in his life he’d been forced to write down recipes he had always just kept in his head.
He and Mom were in the kitchen together, cooking one meal after another, which we were giving away to neighbors, because not even Frankie could eat an entire menu. Mom had taken courses in French cooking last year, after finally admitting that Dad was the better Italian chef. It was her way of staking out new taste-bud territory. They had created these fusion FrenchItalian dishes, but that particular night as they cooked, Dad kept having to stop Mom from adding new ingredients.
“You know what your mother’s problem is?” he said to me as they cooked. He knew better than to ever criticize Mom directly. It always had to be bounced off a third person, the way live TV from China has to bounce off a satellite. “She suffers from ‛Restless Recipe syndrome.’”
Mom’s response was to throw me a sarcastic “Oh, please” gaze, that I would theoretically relay back to my father at our stove somewhere in Beijing.
“It’s true! No matter what recipe she’s cooking, she can’t leave it alone—she has to change it.”
“Listen to him! As if he doesn’t do the exact same thing!”
“Yes—but at a certain point I stop. I let the recipe be. But your mother will get a recipe absolutely perfect—and then the next time she cooks it, she’s gotta add something new. Like the time she put whiskey in the marinara sauce.”
It made me laugh when he mentioned it. Mom had added so much whiskey, we all got drunk. It’s a cherished family memory that I’ll one day share with my children, and/or therapist.
Finally she turned to talk to him directly. “So—I didn’t cook out the alcohol enough—big deal. I’ll have you know I saw that on the Food Channel.”
“So go marry the Food Channel.”
“Maybe I will.”
They looked at each other, pretending to be annoyed, then Dad reached around and squeezed her left butt cheek, she grinned and grabbed his, then the whole thing became so full of inappropriate parental affection, I had to leave the room.
I’m like my father in lots of ways, I guess, but in this respect I’m like my mother. Even when the recipe’s working perfectly, I can never leave well enough alone.
With about a dozen time contracts to fill out—each one a little bit different—I tried to hurry home from school that day, hoping to avoid anyone else who wanted to shave some time off their miserable existence. That’s when I ran into Skaterdud. At first he rolled past me on his board like it was just coincidence, but a second later he looped back around. He flustered me with his eight-part handshake before he started talking.
“Cultural Geography, man,” he said, shaking his head—it was a class we were both in together. “I just don’t get it. I mean—is it culture? Is it geography? You know where I’m going, right?”
“The skate park?” I answered. Sure, it was closed for the winter, but that never stopped Skaterdud before.
“I’m talking conceptually,” he said. “Gotta follow close or you’re not never gettin’ nowhere.”
I’ve learned that silence is the best response when you have no idea what someone is talking about. Silence, and a knowing nod.