No Names, page 3
She opens the cartons, sliding one, along with a pair of chopsticks, toward me. “Your potted eel with bitter melon.”
This is major. Along with various dishes featuring jellyfish and chicken feet, the eel is one of the ones I order to get back at her for ordering lame things like chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo yong. Unlike most people, we never share Chinese. No common ground. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t on her own order anything remotely like this for me. To be honest, I don’t even like the eel all that much. Smells pretty atrocious, actually, and there’s something grim about it, glowing brown and black and green under the low-hanging light. Fortunately, she also got eggrolls that she won’t touch because they’re deep-fried.
She sets a plate down in front of me before I can start eating straight from the carton, then nods at the two cartons of rice. I grab one.
I put some rice and eely goop on my plate, keeping them separate. I’m still preoccupied/obsessed with the record. I say, “Those guys—I mean the No Names—are from here, went to school here.”
“I guess they did.” She chopsticks some chop suey onto her plate.
“That’s so cool.” I grab both eggrolls along with two packets of Chinese mustard. “Did you know them?” I squeeze the mustard on the crisp golden shell and shove half an eggroll into my cakehole.
She hoists a mess of chop suey to her mouth, chewing a little before answering, “No, I didn’t. Same as now, it was a big school. Nearly six hundred in my class. We ran in different crowds.” She swallows. “I don’t think they were even my year.” Then, her expression changes, like she’s trying to figure out some big-deal mystery. She lays her chopsticks down with maximum deliberation, close to full-on dramatic. “How do you or anyone know anything or even care about this random, obscure band?”
Mouth stuffed with the other half of the eggroll, I answer, “Rongo.” I swallow big. “Went down to the Vinyl Heart. He told me about them.”
She drops her voice an octave. “You’re telling me you never made it to Buboltz and Stadler at all today?”
“I’m not telling you, but you can infer that if you’d like.” So much for the truce.
“Look, I know you don’t give a shit about whether you do anything with your gap year or not, but that’s not cool.” She pushes her plate away.
She likes calling my not going to college a gap year. Softens the blow. I raise another good hunk of goopy, squishy eel, and arc it artistically into my wide-open mouth, chewing with faked relish. Tastes better than it smells. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that I do give a shit. I want to get out of here, get away from her and ride as far south as humanly possible. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Vashti.”
She can’t sit still. She gets up and starts clearing her place and closing the lids on the two cartons that are hers, though she’s eaten next to nothing. She puts the food in the fridge before turning to look at me. “You’ve already blown off college and now the internship. In which case, you can get yourself a job, because if you think I’m underwriting any goddam motorcycle trip you’ve got another thing coming.”
I’m surprised she didn’t end the sentence with young man. The sad fact is, thanks to her indulging my every desire, I’ve never even had an after-school or summer job. I’m the only kid I know who’s given carte blanche with the parental credit card. If she cuts it off now that would most definitely put a serious dent in my plans. “Right,” I say with a laugh, thinking she’ll think I’m calling her bluff.
“Look,” she says, moving back over to the island. “I know you think I’m a major downer, but I’m worried. Worried you’re going to get killed, either in an accident or by bandits. I’ve read stories.” She puts her arm around me.
I stay seated on the stool while at the same time shrinking away from her.
She tousles my hair. “And where you going to go without a degree?” She pecks my cheek. “Remember, you’re gifted.”
What she really means is that I’m an investment and she doesn’t want to take a loss. “Don’t patronize me,” I grumble.
“It’s called parenting.”
I get up, leaving her arm dangling over the back of the stool. I take my nearly full cartons of Chinese and dump them in the trash.
1973, MIKE
Never had a best friend before—was always a loner—but from Day One Pete and I have been solid. I still don’t get it. I mean, he’s the outgoing type and, when he moved here, looked like one of the rich kids from the Heights, though in fact he came from the Flats, just like me. Just like me, only different. His family moved from California for a job his dad took at the refinery as a safety engineer, which puts him pretty far above my dad who works as a scrubber. His dad went to college on the G.I. Bill; mine didn’t even finish high school. There’s a hierarchy at the refinery. There’s one everywhere. When they moved here, Pete was still wearing 501s with creases ironed in them, loafers without socks, and Alligator shirts, not the Wranglers, sneaks, and Fruit of the Loom T-shirts most of us guys from the Flats wear. Sure, he looked pretty much like he came from the Heights but somehow cooler, nothing stuck-up in the way he carries himself. Within a few weeks of moving to Hallein, he made starting JV quarterback and had a bunch of rich girls following him around.
We met first day of school. Music class. Everyone’s worst. For most of the period I didn’t notice him across the room on the other side of the double horseshoe of desks because I was seated right behind Doi Sargent with her big, beautiful halo of an Afro. She and I had been paired to perform “Sloop John B” together. Everyone was forced to do it, paired randomly, boy-girl, boy-girl, with the boy strumming ukulele and the girl shaking maracas. The duos before us pretty much mumbled their way through the song, missing every beat. I was not looking forward to our turn, but glad I was with Doi. I like her. She and I are among the kids who stop under the railway trestle for one last cigarette on the way to school. None of us smokers really speak at that hour of the morning, and I didn’t really know her, but the spring before she had made a comment about Hamlet in English class that I thought was brilliant, so I got up the courage to tell her that the next morning. I spoke right as the salt cars rumbled overhead so had to repeat myself like three times. Her comment in class had been about “to thine own self be true.” Polonius’s advice sounded good on the surface, but she wondered how anyone—especially young people like Polonius’s son or Hamlet or Ophelia—could even know oneself, let alone be true to it, and what if it was a no-good, evil self? As she smudged her butt out on one of the steel pillars, she nodded and thanked me for the compliment, adding that she didn’t know anyone, except the teacher, was paying attention.
Doi and I took the makeshift stage in front of the piano. Only because of her was I even going to try at all. From the very first note, her voice lit the entire room. It had power, it had beauty. After the first couple of measures, my awe turned to inspiration. My murmur became audible words, and my Tiny Tim strumming the ukulele got a dose of Hendrix whaling on electric guitar. Doi was putting her heart and hips into it, so I did too. In any case, I thought we were doing great. And the audience of classmates that had been sitting there like zombies started clapping and cheering. But Doi and I didn’t even make it much past the second verse when Mr. Garvey leapt to his feet to cut us off, practically apoplectic, because no, no, no, this wasn’t R & B, this wasn’t rock and roll, this was calypso, and you, young sir, are no Little Richard, and you, young lady, are no Miss Aretha Franklin. Doi scowled at him as he shooed us back to our seats. Good for her. We sure as hell weren’t his Beach Boys, and maybe that was our point. It was only then I saw Pete. He was grinning and called out to Doi and me, “Far out!”
The calypso death march through the roster was interrupted. We were going to have a very, very special treat. A senior by the name of Cindy McNabb was dropping by to inspire us lowly sophomores as to the possibilities of music. The kind of girl still wearing light-blue cat-eye glasses and curling her hair, she had the tremendous honor of being Mr. Garvey’s pet. So, this Cindy McNabb came twirling into the classroom, dressed in a blue-check dress with a matching ribbon in her hair, carrying a hurricane lamp, and singing “O-o-o-klahoma!” at the top of her lungs, like a cartoon opera singer, while Garvey pounded away at the upright, an arrogant grin smeared across his face. Doi whipped around in her seat, shaking her head, mouthing to me, Fuck this shit! while at the same time laughing, raucous but silent. It was as she was turning back around that Pete was fully revealed to me. We looked at each other, both shaking our heads, both grinning wide. We’d never seen each other before so of course had no idea how intense each other’s interest in music was. Good music, that is. Anyway, we were bonded forever by Cindy McNabb proceeding—as Garvey put it—through an incredibly long medley from Oklahoma!: “I’m as corny as Kansas in August …” Exactly. Lucky for Pete, time ran out and he never had to do his “Sloop” duet.
After that first day, Pete and I did the cool-guy nod passing in the halls. Then, second week, he got transferred into Mrs. Homer’s English class, the only college-prep class I’ve been in and by far my favorite. She’s the only teacher I’ve ever really liked. Definitely not one of those mellow hippie teachers telling us how it is, just a lady in horn-rimmed glasses and tweed suit with a big love for literature that she loves sharing with kids. She’s not the kind who feels she has to relate to you or that the books have to relate to our lives, at least not directly. They only have to be great and written by geniuses. She also loves words and makes us learn long vocab lists and etymologies, which I actually like a lot. I’m now kind of obsessed with new words, what my mom complains are five-dollar ones. I also like Mrs. Homer because she doesn’t either like me or dislike me. All other teachers are one way or the other. They either like me because I’m a good-looking kid (according to the grown-ups) who seems troubled, so they want to help me, or else they dislike me because I seem like trouble. It’s kind of hilarious, given my rep as a disaffected youth (Mrs. Homer’s term for Holden Caulfield), that the Lady in Tweed should be my lodestar.
I remember so clear the day Pete joined the class. We were doing Emily Dickinson. Mrs. Homer was finishing reading aloud “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” and I was sitting there totally mesmerized:
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here–
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down–
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing–then–
Mrs. Homer was so into the poem she hadn’t so much as looked up when the door opened, even though everyone else turned to see who it was. The new kid. He stopped and stood there under the threshold, like his breath too had been taken away by the poem. Some months later he told me that’s exactly what had happened. Maybe Pete and I and Mrs. Homer were the only ones in the room who felt moved, but that’s all that mattered. And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here—Those words played over and over in my head, saying to me all that needed to be said about what Mrs. Homer calls “the human condition.” In that moment, I felt I finally had someone to share the company of Silence with.
Third week, though, I nearly murdered Pete. It was the school’s annual slave auction. It’s so wrong on so many levels that we even have a slave auction and definitely a huge mark against me that I know this and yet still got involved. The auction is to raise money for activities, so the guys in AV Club pressured me into getting auctioned off because we needed money to buy a better turntable for DJing school dances. They were sure girls would bid on me like crazy.
My head hung in shame as I walked from my place in the audience up onto the auditorium stage. In the back row sat the handful of Black kids at school, all girls except Ozby Hancock. The guys had either dropped out, been sent up to Camp Comstock, or spent their days down at Golden Gloves. Like all assemblies, the slave auction was mandatory. The Black kids slouched down in their seats in the back row, arms folded tight across their chests, defiant looks on their faces, none more so than Doi Sargent. For sure, any chance I ever had of asking her out, or of even being her friend, went right down the toilet when she saw me up there. I didn’t blame her if she never talked to me again. Not at all. I had only myself to blame for taking part in such an incredibly twisted event.
The guys in AV were right, though, the girls got a bidding war going on me. The giggles and shrieks flew around the room. Only trouble was, halfway through, Pete, who I’d never exchanged even one word with, joined in the bidding, eventually outbidding them all. He bought me. Pete actually bought me. Always—and I mean always—a guy buys a girl to do something like bake him brownies or eat lunch with him, or a girl buys a guy to carry her books, walk her home from school, etc. Guys don’t buy guys. It’s just not done. I was standing on the stage thinking, What the hell? There were catcalls accompanying “Going, going, gone!” that continued as I walked down off the stage and up the center aisle to my master, as required. I could barely lift my feet. Doi Sargent, sitting there in the back, was shaking her head. I avoided her eyes but thought I heard her amid the laughter of the crowd, throwing Hamlet back in my face. “So, this is your true self?”
I’m definitely not the type of guy who takes kindly to being put in embarrassing situations. I wanted to punch this California kid out, except he was giving me two thumbs-up as I approached, like I was in on the prank. He was laughing full-on, which made everyone understand he knew it was so gay for a guy to buy a guy but that he was guy enough to pull it off.
As Pete and I were walking out of the auditorium, he turned to me, and the first thing he said was, “I’d like to see your record collection.” A joke pickup line? I was about to tell him where to get off, when he added, “I hear you’re the music guy.” That flattered me enough to almost forgive him for the whole fiasco. I’m that pathetic. For my slave duty I had to have him over to my house after school to see my record collection and then go over to his house the next day to see his. In the end, mine was the cooler of the two, if I do say so myself. My Deep Purple Who Do We Think We Are and New York Dolls beat anything he had.
Not long after our friendship began, in the school cafeteria, where other kids could hear, Pete asked me, “What do you think our place in history is going to be?” Right there, eating sloppy joes and wilted green beans, sucking chocolate milk from wax cartons with red-striped straws, and with eight other kids at the table, he asked me this like he was some professor in a movie. No one had ever asked me a philosophical question before, not to mention the fact I’d never heard anyone ask anyone else one either, at least not in real life. I’d soon find out he had this nerdy interest in philosophy and ancient history. When he was like ten, he saw A History of Western Philosophy and the first three volumes of The Story of Civilization at a rummage sale and for some reason had to have them. He begged his mom to get them for him, and she did. I couldn’t picture that going down with me and my mom. Not ever. Anyway, in the cafeteria he told me, “Just like ol’ Julius Caesar, you’ve got to make your name in the provinces, then you cross your Rubicon and take over the whole damn show, which in his case meant the whole empire.”
“Wasn’t it true, though,” I asked after pausing, “that Caesar’s buddies killed him because he turned into a tyrant?” I remembered that from Shakespeare.
“Minor detail.” He was smirking. “But seriously, man, you’ve got to have a vision and a mission, so you don’t lose your way and wind up being one of the plebes.” Gesturing at the tables around us, he proclaimed, “‘It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.’” I flashed a confused look, so he added with a laugh, “That’s what Seneca tells us.”
Seneca? The name didn’t help. I thought it was a kind of grape juice or an Indian tribe. I didn’t ask him to clarify, though afterward I made the rare trip to the school library to look it up. Stoic philosopher.
Another day, we were walking along the riverbank when he asked me the meaning of life. He actually asked me that. It was October, the air cold, and I was wearing only a jean jacket over a T-shirt, so I told him the only thing that meant anything to me right then and there was staying warm.
“That’s the problem with you,” he said, “you’re no better than an animal.” He blew his nose onto the back of his hand, flicking the snot into the dead weeds.
I wasn’t sure how to take what he said. I touched the bark of a cottonwood as we passed by. It felt like Styrofoam.
“Look,” he said, stopping dead in his tracks, “you and I and everyone are accidents of chemistry, and this river an accident of geology, gravity, and whatnot, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine something else, that we can’t be fucking profound. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ That’s Socrates.”
I put my cheek on the trunk of another cottonwood and shrugged as I told him, “Okay then, if Socrates says so.” My sarcasm was clear, but what I didn’t tell him was that I actually did like it when he brought me out of my blindness and blankness. Accidents. A happy accident meeting you, Pete Lac.
Though I’ve never worn Alligator shirts like Pete does—and in fact never knew they were really called Lacoste after a guy nicknamed the Crocodile—some people think we’re brothers. A few even wonder if we’re twins. Which is a riot because he’s half Japanese. I guess if you want two people to look alike, they will. That said, we do resemble each other somewhat. Both about five-ten. Both wiry, though he has more decent muscle than I do. Both have kind of long, what you’d call black hair, pale skin. But if you really look, our coloring’s different. My skin and hair have more of a bluish hue to them, his more coppery—his hair the color of root beer. We have the same black eyes, which are really just super-dark brown. Weird thing is, he claims mine are more slanted than his. One difference between us looks-wise is that he has this sharp left canine tooth that slightly overlaps the incisor. It makes him look fierce. What really separates us, though, isn’t any physical trait. When you meet Pete, it’s obvious, he’s at ease in the world, that he doesn’t look back on any mistake. With me, it’s the opposite.
