I stood up and went to the wall. I had a black Sharpie in my pocket and I wrote SHIT FUCK COCK SUCK DIE ASS NOTHINGNESS MEANINGLESS CRY. My writing went a little over LUST, but he was big and in red spray paint.
“What does all that mean?” said Barry.
“Nothing,” I said, but it was something. Barry let us use his Visine and then we went back and made it before the end of auto class. I banged on the side of an engine with a hammer and then I sat in a metal chair. In English, I looked at a book but the words didn’t separate; all the letters were ants marching into the crease.
After school, the weed was wearing off and I walked with Fred toward the court building where Janice had her office. It was near California Avenue, so we just walked down El Camino. Fred had been doing crazy things lately. Stupid things, like throwing rocks through house windows at night, and then running.
“Can you believe that Barry is gonna fuck April?” I said.
“No,” Fred said. Fred had never fucked, and I had only once. It was with Shauna. Everyone called her Dog Bite Shauna because a dog had bitten her and there were two horizontal scar lines on the left side of her face. We did it at a party, and when I was finally on top of her I closed my eyes because her face was so close. We kissed while we did it and I remember being surprised because I was holding her face and I couldn’t feel the scars, but when I opened my eyes they were there.
“Barry? I mean why Barry?”
“I don’t know, cuz he’s a fucker,” said Fred. “And he’s nice.”
“But Barry? He’s, like, chubby and he’s Mormon and… I mean, I don’t think he’s ever fucked before. Why does she like him?” We thought while we walked.
“He plays drums,” said Fred.
“Whatever,” I said, and we walked in silence. On a public mailbox I drew a face with my Sharpie. It was a mournful face, and next to it I wrote,
FUCK INTO THIS
BORN INTO THIS
At California Avenue, Fred went into the café at the Printer’s Ink bookstore to get coffee and I walked on to the court building. It was three thirty already.
I went to the seventh floor and checked in and then waited in a wooden chair for Janice. I wasn’t high anymore but I was so tired I kept my backpack on when I sat. I was slumped to the side of the chair when she came out.
“Okay, Teddy.” I stood up. “Nice shirt,” she said. I had a red plaid shirt on and the pocket was ripped so it hung funny. She was fat, and wearing tan pants. When she turned, her ass was this huge ugly thing that was wide and flattened from sitting. In her office, I took my bag off and sat in the heavy wooden chair across the desk from her.
“So,” she said, and then was very still. Her face was like her ass, flat and wide. Her cheeks stuck out farther than her temples and they hung like the jowls of a Saint Bernard. Her skin was oily and olive-colored with splotches of red around her nose.
I didn’t say anything. The walls were beige and the ceiling had those white squares with little holes in them. It was the most boring place I had ever been. Finally she asked me if I was high and I said I wasn’t and she said she could test me if she wanted to and I told her that would be okay, but she didn’t say anything more about it. Then she said, “You drew a dick on the Runaway Bunny?”
“No, that was Fred,” I said.
She asked who Fred was but I didn’t answer. “Did you have friends visit you while you were doing community service at the Children’s Library?”
“No, no one came, it was me. I’m sorry I drew the dick on the Runaway Bunny, and the vagina on the mom bunny. It was really stupid, I’ll pay for the book.”
“Yes, you will, of course you will, but you’re not doing the rest of your hours there. The librarians don’t want you there anymore.”
“They like me.”
“No, they don’t. You’re lazy and you carved ‘ape’ into their bench outside.”
I started laughing. It seemed really funny at the time so I kept laughing. Maybe I was still high. “I didn’t write ‘ape,’ I wrote ‘apri.’”
“What the hell is ‘apri’?”
“Nothing, just some shit.”
“Well, you’re paying for that too,” Janice said. I said okay, and she asked what kind of asshole I was, defacing libraries. I said I didn’t know. Then she handed me a list of places where I could finish my community service hours. I had thirty-two hours left. I could work at Goodwill, I could clean up graffiti, I could work at Planned Parenthood.
“Goodwill sounds okay,” I said. She was looking at her own copy of the list.
“No, actually you don’t get to choose,” she said. “You’re working at Sycamore Towers.” Sycamore Towers was a nursing home. My great-grandfather had been there before he died at Stanford Hospital. I used to visit when I was about three and he’d always give me chalky candies. “Great-grandpa candies,” we called them. There is a photograph of him and me shaking hands in the doorway to his room: he is tall, in a gray suit, with white hair; and I’m in a diaper, standing on my toes to reach his hand.
I started working at Sycamore Towers. It had fourteen floors; I worked on the twelfth. There was a desk station for the orderlies in the center of the floor, and from there the four wings extended out in each direction, so the place was shaped like a crooked cross. Each wing held eleven rooms for the residents: five on one side of the hall and six on the other. Near the orderlies’ station there was a community room where the old people worked on crafts, and across the hall there was a TV room.
Most of the old people were in wheelchairs and they didn’t move much. They usually sat dispersed about the four halls doing nothing. There were also some that lay in bed all day and had bedpans. Except for the meals and craft time, the old people were left to themselves. Some watched TV in the TV room and a few read, but most stared at nothing.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d walk to the Towers after school. I’d get there around three thirty because it wasn’t very far, over near University Avenue. When I arrived at the Towers the old people would be having their craft time in the community room. I would sit with them and make sure they had their beads and crayons, and if anyone needed water I would get it. They would do crafts for an hour and then they were free until dinner at six. I would push them around in their chairs and clean up after them and get supplies from the storage room for the orderlies.
There was another kid working off community service hours; his name was Brian and he went to the other high school, Gunn. He was Asian, and had a tall head and a square haircut, so he looked like a number 2 pencil eraser. He was a smart kid but he had two hundred hours of community service because he made a bomb at school.
One afternoon when he and I were in the elevator bringing up packs of toilet paper from the basement, I asked him about the bomb.
“It wasn’t a bomb,” he said, like he had been waiting for me to ask. “It was supposed to be a joke. I mean, I’m good at chemistry and I knew what I was doing, I’ve done it a bunch of times before. It was supposed to be a smoke trick, that’s it. All this smoke was going to come out of the drinking fountain, and everyone would get scared, big deal. But the guy I did it with fucked up and put the pipe too far into the fountain, so there was no room for the smoke to get out and the whole thing exploded.”
“Oh fuck,” I said.
“It was bad. The cement went flying and there were flames and a bunch of backpacks got completely melted and a few kids got burned on their backs and heads. One girl had her hair burned off on one side.”
“That’s horrible,” I said.
“Yeah. What’s worse is I got expelled. And I was supposed to go to Duke next year, and they pulled my scholarship.”
For a smart guy Brian seemed dumb, the way his huge head bobbed around when he talked. Just before we got to our floor he asked me if I liked the old people.