King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Page 9

  “Okay, tell you what. I’ll dial all the numbers but the last one, then I’ll stretch the cord around the corner into the basement stairway and close the door. When I yell, you dial the last number.” It was the closest I could get to calling from under the covers.

  My brother said, “Esus.”

  “Come on. It’s the only way I can do this.”

  He shook his head. “Okay, you little dork. I’ll do anything to get this over with.”

  I dialed the first numbers, then disappeared into the stairwell. I hyperventilated. I prayed. What if she said no? What if she said yes?

  From the other side of the door, “Are you ready?”

  Another deep breath.

  “I’m dialing.”

  I heard the dialer whiz, kicked the door open, and slammed down the receiver. “Man, you gotta wait till I say ‘Dial.’”

  “Shit, I thought you fell asleep down there.”

  “I was just getting ready.”

  “Well, get ready quicker this time. I’ve got a homework date.”

  We went through the ritual three more times until John dialed the last number and held the door shut. The first words Paula’s dad heard when he picked up the handset were, “You son-of-a-bitch, lemme outta here!”

  “Is that you, Chris Crutcher?”

  “Uh, yeah. Uh, Mr. Whit—I mean, Les, is Paula there?”

  “She has a cheerleaders’ meeting at school. She’ll be back about nine thirty. I’ll tell her you called.”

  “Okay.” I gritted my teeth. If she knows I called, she’ll expect me to call back. “That would be great.”

  He hung up and I pushed on the door, but my brother was still leaning against it.

  “Let me out. She isn’t home.”

  “Liar.”

  I put the handset against the door and let him hear that her father had hung up, and he backed away.

  We went through the entire procedure again from nine-thirty to about ten-fifteen. Paula answered the phone and said sure, she’d love to go with me, and was I calling from down in a well somewhere?

  I said nope, just right here in the kitchen, then tried to find out what she’d be wearing because I wanted to get her a really nice corsage and I’d be there right on time as soon as we figured out what right on time was and she didn’t have to worry about me honking because I’d come right to the door and she said, “Uh, it’s two months away, we could talk about it at school.”

  I said okay, but in fact she would be very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) to see me at school for the next two months, because my mother would regale her mother with every detail of my suave phone manner on this night, and my brother would probably write an article for the school newspaper about what a hopeless dork his adopted brother was.

  What happened next had to be the slow act of an angry God who punishes you for things you haven’t even done yet, because unbeknownst to me there began growing, deep inside my brain stem, the Pimple That Would Be Stotan. This was not some molehill, or some prevolcanic rise, or even a small-to-medium Appalachian peak. This pimple would have its own spread in National Geographic. It was snow capped. It had climbing space for Sherpas.

  And it reached its maximum height and breadth two days before the White Christmas Ball.

  But I was lucky in those days to be intimately acquainted with one Ron Boyd, quarterback, point guard, and first-rate dermatologist who would later be the hand behind the power that made me spit my teeth out in front of Gerry Greene, who had a quick remedy for my leprous condition.

  “Coke bottle treatment,” he said.

  “What do you want me to do, beat it to death?”

  He looked more closely at the throbbing pustule. “You’d need something a lot bigger than a Coke bottle to kill that thing,” he said. He rolled up his pant leg, pointing to a slight discoloration on his calf. “Big ol’ ass boil on here just two days ago,” he said, and he outlined the prescribed treatment.

  That night as my parents lay sleeping, dreaming of their three children safe in their beds, I crept into the kitchen, quietly dropped a Coke bottle into a water-filled pan on the stove, and placed a wet washrag into the freezer. When the water came to a rolling boil and the rag was nearly stiff, I lifted the bottle out with tongs, wrapped it in the freezing washrag, and placed the mouth of the bottle over the mountainous zit, the idea being that as the air inside the bottle cooled and contracted, it would suck the core of the Vesuvian blemish, whappo!, into the bottle, rendering it harmless.

  It did not come off as advertised.

  As the air inside the bottle cooled and contracted, my forehead grew tighter and tighter. My eyes bulged. The pimple didn’t pop, simply extended farther and farther into the bottleneck. It wasn’t working! I pulled hard on the bottle to remove it, but it was sucking my face off my head. Man, I am going to the White Christmas Ball wearing a Coke bottle on my forehead! With that horrifying fate in mind, I gripped the bottle with both hands, gritted my teeth, and yanked. It popped free with the sound of two anteaters kissing in an echo chamber. Tremendous relief washed over me as I sank to the kitchen floor. Given the alternative, I was more than happy to escort the throbbing pustule to the Christmas dance. But later, when I gazed into the bathroom mirror, I changed my mind. The bottle had left a deep purple ring around the grossly offending blemish, forming a perfect three-dimensional bull’s-eye right in the middle of my head.

  Paula didn’t say much when I showed up at her door in my brown blazer, slacks, white socks, and a stocking cap pulled low on my head, but later, as we moved across the dimly lit dance floor beneath fake cotton clouds and dangling paper snowflakes, two jerky steps forward, one jerky step back, at arm’s length, she peered deeply into my eyes. “Nice of you to take off the hat,” she said; then, looking closer, “Is that a corn plaster on your forehead?”

  “Yeah,” I said in my best John Wayne. “I was showing some of the freshman football players how to do a head spear in P.E. the other day and drove a loose rivet in the helmet I was using into my forehead. It’s no big thing.”

  “That must have hurt,” she said. “It got you right on that monstrous pimple.”

  It’s hard to say whether it was the pimple or my primitive social graces (singing Christmas carols while gargling punch may have put her off), but when the Sadie Hawkins dance rolled around that next February, Paula Whitson treated herself to a date with a guy from her own class, both scholastically and maturationally. The fact that he was a good-looking guy, as well as a jock, may have had something to do with the fact that I went home and sailed my forty-five single of “Hey, Paula” by one-hit wonders Paul and Paula (a song, I believed up until I discovered she had gone elsewhere for companionship to the Sadie Hawkins dance, that was recorded with me in mind) into the vacant lot across the yard from my bedroom window.

  My further actions in response to all that nearly got me thrown out of school and put off my chances of getting close to something soft and warm until after high-school graduation.

  If the really popular girls couldn’t see what a nice guy they were getting in me, or if they, in fact, didn’t want a nice guy, which a number of astonishingly socially conscious pump jockeys who worked at my dad’s service station were quick to tell me, maybe they liked being treated rough. At least that is the thinking that led me to place probably the most magnificent scab cultivated to that date in our hemisphere on Bonnie Heavrin’s desk.

  It was early spring of my sophomore year, only weeks after I had driven with a few select friends to the McCall Bowling Alley on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance. (The selection of those friends was done by the girls of Cascade, Idaho, not asking them to the dance.) At any rate, basketball season was finished and preseason workouts for track had begun. Cascade is situated in a high mountain valley nearly a mile above sea level, so in a normal year there are still snowbanks piled higher than your little sister well into the spring, and the high-school track remains covered in white. Early track practices a
re held on the soggy, potholed back roads of town. That year Ron Nakatani, our high jumper, practiced his form wearing a rubber suit, bar-rolling into a snowbank.

  At the end of the regular workout, Buzzy Estell and I were practicing baton exchanges for the second-string 400-yard relay. Okay, the third-string 400-yard relay. In those days the runner who was to receive the baton would extend his left arm straight to his side, fingers curled and touching the outer thigh. The runner passing the baton would slap it into the receiver’s cupped fingers; the receiver would clutch it and run like hell.

  On our first attempt Buzzy tried to slap the baton into my hand, stepped in a pothole, and missed, firing it onto the road directly in front of me, and I stepped on the baton at the same moment he stepped on the back of my track shoe. My right elbow was the first part of my body to hit the ground, and a huge strawberry, close to two-and-a-half inches in diameter, blossomed like the corsage I would have bought for Paula Whitson had she asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

  A week and a half later, I carefully peeled the gauze bandage off to reveal the beginnings of what would turn into a truly remarkable clot. The dark red base was marbled much as I believe Mars would look if yellow rivers fanned out over its surface. It stood a good quarter-inch high, and if I could re-create the exact mix of body fluids, I would sell it to the Hair Club, because what had been, before the accident, fine light peach fuzz had been fertilized into a bouquet of thick dark hairs that looked like rebars protruding from a broken concrete wall.

  This was a truly awesome structure, and nurturing it must have been sucking needed blood and oxygen from my brain, because in that diminished state I convinced myself that if you could make a girl laugh or scream, she would be yours.

  I protected the scab like a prematurely born puppy for nearly two months until, late one night, just before bedtime, I lifted one side, then the other, slowly, meticulously loosening it bit by bit all the way around until finally I removed it intact and undamaged. I dug through my storage closet to retrieve a small, expensive-looking box from a shelf of treasured mementos, removed my glow-in-the-dark ESUS SAVES, and laid the hairy scarab on the soft white cotton.

  In the morning, after trying it out on Candy, to rave reviews, I hauled that baby to school, giddy in the face of an exciting, if romantically regressed, day.

  Bonnie Heavrin was always late to first period. She was slender, with long blond hair and freckles, already a varsity cheerleader. Bonnie had been the first girl in our class to get boobs, had always dated older guys. She could sing country-western music like Patsy Cline, shrieked and grabbed on to you in scary movies, and had, for a very short time in her freshman year, run off to Florida with her boyfriend, who was about to be thrown in the county jail. After my undeniable rebuff at the Sadie Hawkins dance, I had decided Bonnie was my kind of girl.

  As the bell rang, I removed the box from between the hard covers of my notebook, watching for Bonnie to make her late entrance. Five minutes later the door flew open, and as she made her customary apologies to the teacher, Mrs. Phelps, I removed the scab from the box like an artifact from the King Tut collection and placed it delicately atop her desktop. Mrs. Phelps accepted the apology as always and told Bonnie to sit down while class continued.

  I stared at my book.

  “What’s this? What is this?” Out of the corner of my eye I watched as she gingerly touched it with a fingernail. “What is this? I’ve seen this.…” She glanced over at my elbow, bald and exposed for the first time in nearly two months, and screamed so high and shrill the hair on the back of the neck of every student in the classroom came to a stiff salute. She whisked the scab to the floor, jumped up, and tried to stomp it flat. I was on that floor in an instant, snatching at my treasure while dodging her heel, which sent it scooting across the newly waxed floor like a hairy red-and-yellow beetle. I snagged it and closed it quickly into the box at the same moment I noticed a second set of heels—three-inch stiletto heels, one toe tapping. One had to look no farther to know whose feet were stuffed into those. I stood up, staring at Mrs. Phelps’s extended hand.

  “It’s a science project,” I said.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Okay, but I gotta have it back for science.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “It’s a ladybug that was exposed to radiation,” I said. “Be real careful with it.”

  Bonnie was hyperventilating. “It’s that scab from his arm,” she gasped. “He is such a pig.”

  “I was going to ask if you wanted to be my lab partner,” I said to Bonnie. “This thing is an A for sure. I didn’t know you’d get all queasy.”

  Bonnie shuddered. “It’s a scab, Mrs. Phelps. Look at it. It was on his arm.”

  I already had an iffy relationship with Mrs. Phelps. Earlier in the year she had come into the classroom almost teary-eyed and announced that she had some very bad news. When someone in Cascade says they have some very bad news, particularly in that tone, you expect that someone has died, and it is most likely someone you know. We sat in silent anticipation.

  “Robert Frost died yesterday,” she said.

  Before I could stop them, these words spilled out of my mouth: “Good, he can’t write any more poems we have to read.”

  The people sitting in front of me in my row dropped their heads to their desks to avoid Mrs. Phelps’s hand coming down the aisle aimed directly at my head, and she hit my ear so hard I had to put my palm on the floor to keep from being knocked out of my desk. It was a gesture my mother had long ago perfected, used by her, also, to silence my savage tongue.

  That night my father raised his hand, palm out, just as we were beginning to eat. “I have some bad news,” he said.

  We looked up, waiting.

  “Robert Frost died yesterday.”

  “Oh, man,” I said. “Bummer.”

  Mrs. Phelps glared at me now, then at the pink spot on my elbow. “If I open this box and find that horrid scab, Chris Crutcher, I’m going to expel you from this English class. You’ll get an F and have to take it over next year with the class behind you. If it is indeed a ‘ladybug exposed to radiation,’ take it to the science room, and I’ll check with Mr. Payne at lunch. If, on the other hand, you say not one more word about it as a science project but rather take it down to the janitor’s room and have Otto throw it into the furnace, we’ll go on with this day as if this unfortunate event never happened.”

  Man. Two months in the making, and I was about to lose it after just one girl. I had a list….

  “What you do next is going to have a huge effect on your scholastic future,” Mrs. Phelps said. “And you’d better do it quick.”

  I watched the fancy box burst into flames as Otto the janitor flipped it into the fiery furnace, a humbling end for the original container of the trinket that should have brought hope to the civilized world. ESUS SAVES.

  Otto didn’t check the contents of the box, however, so the scab rode home in my front pocket. For years, late at night in the dark of my bedroom, you could see it perched on the headboard of my bed, in the protective greenish glow of Esus, a ghoulish monument to the mystery of elusive romance.

  Dead Boy Sledding, or Why Things Happen

  10

  I WONDER IF MR. DICKERSON would have beat out “The Star Spangled Banner” on Eddie Breidenbach’s butt while we were killing time waiting for our parents to bring the cake and punch and popcorn balls to our second-grade Christmas party if he’d known Eddie would be dead before school started the next year.

  Dickerson was the music teacher for the entire school, and he’d been making the rounds to the elementary classes all morning, playing a rhythm game. One student would pick a song and clap out the beat while the others guessed what it was. The person who guessed correctly got to clap the next song. It was fun, but Eddie started having a little too much fun, guessing the titles to “dirty songs” he’d learned from his older brothers.

  Dickerson was a huge man, with dark curly hair and a voi
ce famous for echoing “Figaro…Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” off the walls of the school halls. He was a great guy unless you got him mad, which almost anyone could do at any time. Clara Hutchins was clapping, and Eddie called out “I Love To Go Swimmin’ with Bare Nekked Women” as his guess, and Dickerson called him over. The look on Dickerson’s face wiped the smiles off ours. Eddie stayed put. Dickerson called him over again. Eddie said no. Dickerson said now. Eddie said, “Make me.” Dickerson did.

  He bent Eddie over his knee, and Eddie tried to kick him, but Dickerson held his legs down with an elbow. Eddie’s round face was flushed; the vein on his forehead stood out like a garden hose. “You better let me up,” he said.

  “Okay, kids,” Dickerson said, “what’s this one?” He began spanking out a song. We laughed and made some guesses, but Dickerson shook his head and spanked harder.

  Eddie called Dickerson by his last name, minus the last five letters, and Dickerson’s hands came down like drumsticks.

  “I bet this is what you do to your fat wife,” Eddie yelled, embarrassed now beyond caring, and Dickerson hammered harder.

  “She’s so fat I bet she doesn’t even feel it!” Eddie screamed.

  We no longer laughed, suddenly struck with the thought of our own seven-year-old butts stretched across Dickerson’s knee. “‘Oh, Say Can You See,’” Ron Nakatani yelled. “It’s ‘Oh, Say Can You See’!”

  “Which verse?” Dickerson yelled, hammering so hard now that Eddie’s teeth rattled.

  Eddie came from a large Catholic family, with siblings of both sexes both older and younger than he. I played at their house sometimes. They were among the last in town to get indoor plumbing. Eddie’s dad, Otto, was the school janitor, which was a cool thing because it meant Eddie could get you into places in the school that a lot of other kids never saw, like the boiler room and the tiny shop where Otto sometimes fixed things for kids in what little spare time he had.

  Eddie didn’t tell his dad what happened at the Christmas party because the prevailing parental philosophy of the day was “If you get in trouble at school, you’re in twice as much trouble at home.” Parents thought teachers were ordained. I remember after the party I told Eddie I bet he was pretty embarrassed. He said he was going to get even with Dickerson if it was the last thing he did. I told him I’d help him, because I wanted Eddie to be my friend so he could get me into the catacombs of the school, and I never liked “Figaro” anyway.