Текст книги "Palo Alto Stories"

Автор книги: James Franco

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

“Kick that motherfucker!” said the guys.

Lewis stepped back and kicked me. He got me on the top of my head, and he stubbed his toe on my skull, and everyone laughed because he said “Ow, shit” and started dancing around. I lay down there covering my face while they all laughed at Lewis’s foot. I waited for more. But it didn’t come. The laughter faded, and then they were gone.

For a while I lay on the ground and looked at I LOVE YOU BITCH! Then I got up. I went to the toilet stalls and sat on one of the toilets and waited for the period to end. Just sat there. When the warning bell rang, I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. My right eye was purple on the inside bottom, and my nose had bled all over my lips and down my neck and onto my off-white PE T-shirt. A nice splatter across the neckline. All the kids were coming in now. Some looked at me, but I didn’t wash off and I didn’t change my clothes. I left my things in my locker and walked to my next class, American History with Mr. Hurston.

I was there before everyone. I sat at my desk and waited. The middle of my face was throbbing. My classmates started coming in, but no one noticed me. My seat was toward the back. Finally Stacey came in and sat down. She didn’t look at me because she never looks at me, but I stared at her really hard until she finally looked.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What’s wrong with your face?”

“Nothing is wrong with it.”

“You’re bleeding, Jeremy,” she said loudly. “Oh, Jesus, you’re bleeding!” Other people looked.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I just stared at her. Real hard.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

“Because,” I said.

“Because what?” She said that quietly, like she was scared.

Then Mr. Hurston came in. He said, “Hello, class, new morning, same old history,” like he always did.

“Mr. Hurston,” said good Jerry Holtz. “Mr. Hurston, look, Jeremy’s bleeding.”

“Mr. Hurston, he’s staring at me,” said Stacey. She was right; I wasstaring at her. Mr. Hurston walked over to my desk. He put his hand under my chin, in the blood, and held my face up to his. I looked into his empty blue eyes. His eyebrows were silvery like his hair.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Who did this to you?”

“No one.”

“Okay, no one did it, right. All right, who?”

“No one.”

“Fine, if you won’t tell me, I want you to go to the office right now and see Mrs. Moore.” He looked around the room. “Jerry, I want you to take Jeremy to the office, to see Mrs. Moore, okay?”

“Sure, Mr. Hurston,” said Jerry. He walked to the door and waited for me.

Mr. Hurston let my face go. I didn’t stand up yet. I just turned my head and stared at Stacey again.

“What?”she said. She sounded mad now. Everyone was watching.

Then I leaned in and whispered, “I did it for you.”

“You did what for me? What are you talking about?”

But I was already standing and walking toward Jerry at the door. There was Lewis walking in with his dumb look.

“Did Thomas Jefferson do that?” I said. And walked past him. I didn’t look back, but I could hear people asking Stacey what it was all about.

In the hall Jerry asked me what happened. I told him I was fighting for a girl. He asked who. I told him he wouldn’t understand.

“Why did you say you did it for Stacey?” he asked as we crossed the quad toward the tower building.

“What? I didn’t.”

“I thought you did.”

“No.”

“Well that’s good,” he said. “That would have been a shame.”

“Why?”

“No, I mean if you had done anything for her.” The sun was warm on my back and reflecting off the windows of the office, a bright circle into my eyes.

“I didn’t do it for her.”

“Cuz she’s a total slut,” he said.

“I fucking know,” I said. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

We were almost at the office. The office was an old brick building with a tower in the center with a Spanish cupola. We called it the Tower Building.

As we got closer each window in the tower flashed yellow and white.

At the office Jerry ran up the stairs. He stood at the top and held the door for me. The reflection in the windows above Jerry was as bright as the real sun. As I walked up the steps my face pounded under the skin, I could feel the blood thick and sticky on my clavicle, and I stared right into the burning center of light.

Killing Animals

Birds, and birds, and animals, and things; with slingshots, and BB guns, we killed ’em, and killed ’em. We killed so many.

Every once in a while one of my friends would get a BB gun and we would go on a spree. We’d shoot anything that moved.

When we were in seventh grade, Ronny Feldman and Ami and I slept over at Saul’s house. Ronny brought two slingshots. They were black metal in a scary Y shape; the arms stuck out farther forward than the base. Tied to the arms was plastic tubing that you stretched back, and a soft, greasy little moleskin pad where you put the thing you were firing.

At Saul’s we had pepperoni pizza from Domino’s and watched Colors.We all had three pieces of pizza except Saul—he had five.

Saul was the biggest. He had hair on his belly, balls, and back.

In Colors,the Bloods and the Crips were fighting over turf. Blue and red were important to them. The cops were trying to stop the gangs, but the gangs kept fighting. We watched very closely, we couldn’t help it.

The movie made me so depressed and I knew the world was ending.

After Colors,we watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.It was a movie I liked when I was younger, but after watching Colorsit was silly. It was silly but I still watched. I tried to forget about the gangs.

Ronny said he liked Michelangelo because he was the funniest.

“I like Michelangelo,” he said. “He tells all the jokes.” It made sense that Ronny liked Michelangelo because Michelangelo had personality. Ronny himself wasn’t very funny, but he was wily.

I liked Michelangelo too, but I was even less funny than Ronny. And I wasn’t wily. Leonardo was the leader, Donatello was a scientist, and Raphael was a great fighter. I was none of those.

After the Ninja Turtles, we all arm wrestled on the coffee table. Ronny could beat Ami, and I could beat Ronny. I was surprised, because Ronny was tough even though he was little. It felt good to beat him.

Saul said, “Ryan is stronger than he looks.”

Saul could beat everyone at arm wrestling. But it wasn’t fair wrestling with him because he was so much bigger. His dick was seven inches. He showed us.

I had no hair under my pits. At the beach, I held my arms down at my sides before I got in the water.

I thought I had no hair because I masturbated so much. But I couldn’t stop doing it.

At midnight the house was quiet. We quietly slid open the paneled glass door at the back and left. There was dew on the grass in the backyard, and the air moved slow and cold like a spirit. No one spoke, and it was very quiet. It felt like birth.

We crept to the front yard, and out to the street, and we were away. We were free with the slingshots.

The streets were an empty stage set. All the rules of the daytime were gone.

Each block was lined with gray light posts, with ovate lamps at the top, which cast white-yellow beams onto the cement. The center of the beams, where they hit the pavement, was like nougat.

We passed through the milky light and into the shadows.

Bushes were sentient, and trees shook their leaves in bunches like animals shaking their hides. The wind came in languid gusts like whispered reminders.

We heard cars drive in isolation down Oregon Expressway, in the gray zone, out of sight.

The atmosphere was a held breath, and the shadowed house fronts were sleeping dogs.

*   *   *

We shot rocks at a streetlight two blocks from Saul’s house, but the light didn’t break. It was made of plastic.

We saw no birds and we wandered.

In front of a low, wide one-story house, a skinny calico cat picked its way on sharp points across the dewy lawn.

“Please don’t,” I whispered. “Please, please don’t.”

Ronny lowered his slingshot.

The cat squeezed under a wooden fence. Ronny shot a rock after the cat, but it just hit the fence.

I was happy for the cat, but I suddenly felt very lonely.

Farmers, Italians, and sociopaths kill cats. Sociopaths piss in their beds. French people use piss as perfume.

I had a black and white cat named Toby. When he was young, the neighbor cut his balls off for eating fish from his pond. I wasn’t born when that happened.

We walked across town and ended up at Mitchell Park.

Mitchell Park was big, with baseball fields, and soccer fields, and playgrounds, and a pool. Next door was our junior high school, J.L.S. J.L.S. was far from all our houses because it was the only junior high in the city.

I used to play soccer at Mitchell Park when I was younger. When I was ten, my team, the Blue Scorpions, got into the intercounty championship. The playoffs were at Mitchell Park. We won and won, and got to the finals. I played defense and defended a lot.

My dad yelled like crazy until one game the ref told him to leave.

In the finals we played an East Palo Alto team, the Red Bullets. They were all black kids and we were all white. They were all bigger than we were. They just kept getting by me.

At night the park was empty. There was nothing to shoot, so we wandered around the dark park. We walked through the playground. There were some animals on springs that little kids could ride. A horse and a seal and a lion. We kicked them until the lion lost his face; it was bent inward, the eyes all wrong.

There was a municipal shed in the middle of the park. Saul and Ronny and Ami boosted me up to a transom that was cracked open. I pulled the transom open and scrambled through like a squirrel. I dropped down into the dark and then opened the door from the inside.

There was nothing in there but a bunch of basketballs, and footballs, and soccer balls, and cones, and stuff like that. We took the balls out and threw them into the air and shot them, but they didn’t pop. Then we kicked them all over.

We walked across the park and went to our school. It was called J.L.S. after J. L. Stanford, the guy who built the university. At night the hallways were dark, and the walls were gray and grim.

We shot pellets through the windows. The pellets made little mosquito bites in the glass. We would be able to admire our work on Monday.

We carved with rocks into the window of Mr. Shepard’s Social Studies classroom. I wrote FUCK HOMER because we were learning about the Greeks. Ronny carved a swastika. We all told him he was stupid. Saul and Ami were both Jewish, and so was I, but I wasn’t raised Jewish.

Ronny just thought the swastika was funny.

We kicked over some trash cans, and then walked back toward Saul’s along Middlefield Road.

We passed Simone Chris’s house. She had been my girlfriend in fourth grade. I fought Sam Tuttle for her. He was tall and thin like a scarecrow, and said that he liked her. One lunch, everyone gathered behind the elementary school library, and Sam and I got ready to fight. I kicked Sam in the shin and he fell to the ground holding his leg. I felt awesome.

But I got in trouble, especially because I took karate at the YMCA, and karate was supposed to be for self-defense.

Then Simone broke my heart. She left me for Rio Gereaux, a gymnast. It was fourth grade, but it was still a big deal. I mean, when are things supposed to start mattering? Now, and now, and now.

Before we hit Loma Verde, we passed Unity church. It was where my mom took me when I was little. She was Jewish, but she went to church because she liked the minister, a smiley guy named Stan.

One time at Sunday school I won a Bible in a raffle. It had all of Jesus’s words written in red. Fish, and loaves, and the first will be last, and thy neighbor, and Caesar, and an eye for a tooth, and he killed the fig tree because it wouldn’t give him fruit.

We shot BBs at the Unity church. The BBs made little popping sounds when they went through the church windows. Seeing those little vein-filled bites used to scare me when I was younger. They made me think of anonymous bad people with destructive things in their hands. Faceless and swirling. Now we were the bad people.

We stopped by 7-Eleven and bought some Hostess apple pies. They came in a bright green rectangular wrapper. I paid for Ronny’s. He got cherry flavor and it came in a red wrapper.

Two cops came in as we were walking out. A skinny, young white cop and a fatter, older black cop. They were talking about something. We were twelve years old and it was two a.m. Ronny and Saul had the slingshots in the backs of their pants, under their shirts. The cops didn’t even look at us as we passed.

After we walked out, I looked back. Inside, the cops were buying coffee and laughing. I could see the steam rising from the cups on the counter before they put the lids on.

We walked back to Saul’s eating our pies. They were crescent shaped and glazed. We took big bites and they were very sweet, and we all wanted some milk but we didn’t have any.

A week later the four of us went out with the slingshots during the day. We went to Greer Park, near the 101 freeway. Across the freeway was East Palo Alto.

There were tons of birds in Greer, but we had to be discreet because there were adults with children around.

We traded off with the slingshots, and shot metal pellets and rocks at the birds in the trees. We were bad shots; we hit nothing.

One bird flew away, and Ronny tried to shoot it as it flew. He aimed too low, and the pellet went across the street, into the window of a ground-floor apartment. We ran.

We looked back and a black man was running after us. He was lithe, and serious, and fast. There was no way to get away so we stopped when he was close.

We told him we were just trying to hit birds.

The man didn’t look so mad then.

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I just have a baby in the house, and it usually sits in its cradle right under that window you shot. She wasn’t there, but, you know, I just can’t have broken glass fall on her.”

We told him that we understood.

Then he let us go.

When we were almost back at Saul’s house, we saw a dove sitting in a tree. While he was still walking, Saul shot a pellet at it and hit it. It fell like a heavy glove, and hit the cement with a dull sound. We walked over. Its round, black eye was open and looking up at the sky. The pellet was in the back of its head and there was a little blood in its smooth feathers.

At the end of the year, we all went to Ami’s bar mitzvah. We weren’t all friends anymore, but we were still nice to one another. At the party I arm wrestled Ronny again, and I could still beat him.

In eighth grade I went to a new school. Jordan Middle School reopened because there were so many kids in Palo Alto. More kids than in the old generation.

Jordan’s old mascot was a dolphin, but we voted and changed the mascot to a jaguar. A dolphin was stupid because there was no ocean around.

But there were no jaguars or jungles around either.

But one time there was a mountain lion that wandered through Palo Alto. It had come down from the hills above Stanford. Eventually it climbed a tree above Juana Briones Elementary School. They shot it so that it wouldn’t eat the kids.

Ronny and Saul stayed at J.L.S. and Ami had different friends, so I made new friends at Jordan. My new friends were Ed and Ivan. Neither of them was handsome.

After school, the three of us would go to Ed’s and sit in his room and listen to Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusionand The Best of Bob Dylan,and The Best of Jimi Hendrix,and The Best of the Doors. Ed’s house was near the school, and we would go there and make Campbell’s soup on the stove, and I would put in lots of extra spices like oregano. Ed said that I put in too many, but I liked all the spices.

Sometimes we would smoke tobacco out of the meerschaum pipe Ed’s dad gave him. Sometimes we would take his dad’s liquor from the cabinet. When we took some, we’d put water back in the bottles so his dad wouldn’t know.

We were also friends with Dan and Jerry, but they were jocks and were different. They were more popular with the girls, but sometimes they spent time with us, especially when we were drinking.

We also hung out with Howard Vern. He was anorexic, the only anorexic boy I have heard of. He had an awful body shaped like a pear, with skinny arms and skinny legs, and cellulite on his stomach. We said he was “skinny-fat.”

One time, Ed and Ivan and Howard, and I went over to Ed’s after school. Howard brought a water balloon launcher. Ed’s parents weren’t at home so we drank some Jim Beam, and then we picked a bunch of fat oranges from the tree in Ed’s backyard, and went up on the roof with the water balloon launcher.

When kids rode by on their bikes, we shot oranges at them. Girls and boys.

The launcher launched the oranges hard. It must have hurt when they hit. Tom Prince rode by and we hit him right on his big ass. It sounded like a slap on a face, and even from the roof, I could see his ass ripple through his pants. He got off his bike and started throwing oranges back at us on the roof.

Tom Prince had horrible face acne, which sprouted in small groupings, like piles of bat shit. The piles were always runny because he would pick at them. He was an angry, fat young man.

He threw a bunch of oranges, but he couldn’t hit us. We laughed and laughed at the fat-ass on the ground.

Howard was laughing too.

Then Tom stopped throwing and yelled, “What the fuck are you laughing at, you anorexic fuck? Why don’t you go and slit your wrists again, you fat, pear-shaped piece of shit.”

Howard stopped laughing. He yelled at Tom so loudly he almost fell off the roof. It was funny that Tom called Howard a pear, because Tom was shaped like a pear too. An even fatter pear than Howard. Tom got on his bike and rode off and Howard was still yelling.

We shot at more kids with the launcher. Then we hit a small Asian girl in the head and it made her fall off her bike. We hid on the back side of the roof and peeked over. She was crying when she picked up her bike. But she didn’t do anything; she just got back on and rode off.

When I left Ed’s that evening to go home, the street was strewn with smashed oranges.

When I got home, my cat, Toby, was waiting for me.

On weekends we had nothing to do. The girls didn’t like us like they liked Jerry and Dan. When they didn’t have plans with the girls, Jerry and Dan would hang out with us. We would go out egging.

We would go out on a weekend night at about nine and ride our bikes to the Lucky’s supermarket on Alma. Late at night there was hardly anyone in the store, and the checkout clerk didn’t care that we were buying five dozen eggs. “Making some omelets,” we would say. Sometimes we would go next door to Bob’s Donuts and buy some bear claws and milk.

Then we would ride around and look for late-night joggers and walkers. If we saw a couple taking a stroll, we would pelt the shit out of them. Usually the man would have to get macho and chase us, but they never caught us. Except Howard. Howard was always the slowest, and he would get caught and have to cry his way out of a fight.

One time Ivan and I stole a motorized scooter. It was sitting in an open garage and we walked in and took it. We could fit two on it: one to drive and one to throw eggs. It was tiny, but it went pretty fast.

Ivan and I were out on the scooter one night. We didn’t have money to buy eggs, so we took some hard-boiled eggs from my fridge. We saw a white guy in a leather jacket walking with an Asian woman. Ivan slowed down, and I hit the man with two hard-boiled eggs, right on his jacket. I hit the girl once in the head and she bent over. Three hits was pretty good shooting.

The man chased us, but we were long gone.

We went to 7-Eleven to play Street Fighter II. Ivan was better at it. He could play with Ryu, Zangief, Dhalsim, or Blanka. Zangief was Russian like Ivan, but Ivan reminded me more of Blanka. Blanka was a Brazilian beast of some sort. Ivan was kind of a beast. Like he was mean on the outside and sensitive on the inside. And Blanka means “white” in Spanish, and Ivan was very pale, so it all just made me think of him.

I could only play with Guile, a U.S. military guy who could do back flips. But he had a special invisible throw if you knew the code.

In the middle of one of our games, a car pulled up in the parking lot.

I just knew.

“Run,” I said to Ivan. I ran out the door just as the man in the leather jacket got out of the car.

Across the parking lot, I looked back and saw Ivan messing with the scooter. The man in the leather jacket grabbed him and put him on the ground, and then started kicking him. I stopped running, but I didn’t go back. I just watched.

The Asian woman was in the front seat of the car. She looked over at me. She didn’t look sad for Ivan at all. When she started calling to the man in the leather jacket, I ran.

I saw Ivan at school on Monday. He had a black eye and his bottom lip was purple at the side. We never talked about the man with the leather jacket to each other, but Ivan told people about it. Ivan told the story like I had left 7-Eleven before the guy even came.

Brian was a kid from Los Angeles. He had a tattoo of an eight ball on his leg, but it was smeared. He wasn’t supposed to get it wet the day after he got it, but he took a shower. It looked like a drawing that had been wiped with a sponge.

I went with him to JJ’s house. JJ was a skateboarder. He had a half-pipe in his backyard. I wasn’t good on the half-pipe.

JJ had a BB gun. We stood in his backyard and shot at birds that flew overhead, but didn’t hit any.

JJ sold me the BB gun for $50.

When I had the BB gun, Ivan and Ed and Dan and Jerry and I took it out. We walked in the creek by my house, Matadero. It was a cement creek that ran from one side of town to the other. The water got really high when it rained. My dad said not to go in it. He said that every winter, when the water got high, kids would take a raft in it, and someone would drown.

But that was when I was little. When I was in eighth grade, we went into it all the time. Sometimes we would catch crawfish and step on them and they’d crunch. We also burned things down there: a stuffed bear that an ugly girl gave me on Valentine’s Day, sitting on a little wooden chair that my brother made. It smelled like chemicals.

We walked down the creek with a BB gun. Dan hit a bird, and it dropped to the dirt. It wasn’t dead, so he shot it a bunch more times until it stopped moving.

We shot at house windows from the creek. We made designs in the glass. We almost made a smiley face in one, but the eyes were crooked.

We walked down the creek, all the way to Hoover Park. Some men were working on a roof. They were bent over in construction hats and hammering boards. Jerry aimed at one of the men. He missed once, and then he hit him. The man stood up. The way he stood, we knew Jerry got him in the ass. The man looked around and then he ran to the side of the roof. We all ran back down the creek toward my house.

It was far to get back to my house. In the bottom of the cement creek the water was low and we ran down there. The bottom was covered in slime and it was easy to slip, but it was harder to see us down there because the cement walls on the sides were high.

We could see the construction man’s car stop on all the bridges over the creek. He was looking for us, and we ran faster.

Finally we made it back to my house.

Inside, we rested. We watched some of Diff’rent Strokes,and then everybody left.

Later, someone stole the BB gun. I don’t know who, but they’re out there shooting things.

In high school, Howard Vern got a paint pellet gun. The balls were brightly colored: yellow, green, red, blue, white, orange, and black. They were round and waxy like candy.

One night I slept over at Howard’s house. At midnight, Bill came by in his jeep. Bill was handsome, but retarded. It was hard for him to put sentences together, and his emotions were all fucked-up. Other days, he and I spent a lot of time smoking pot and doing pull-ups on a bar above his bedroom door.

I wasn’t friends with Jerry or Dan anymore. They played on the school sports teams, and started calling me a fag after I quit the football team. They said Ed and I were gay together. It made me want to stay away from Ed because everyone started saying we were gay. Some girls even made up a song and a dance about us. I never saw the dance, but I heard about it.

Bill and Howard and I drove around town thinking about things to shoot with the paint pellet gun. We shot stop signs and mailboxes, and we shot at the high school, but those things weren’t very fun.

“Let’s go shoot Alice Henderson’s house,” I said.

Alice was the girl who made up the gay dance about me. I think that she was mad at me, and at everyone because she was a slut, and everyone knew that she was a slut. I guess the song and dance helped her anger out.

Howard and Bill thought Alice Henderson’s was a great idea and we drove over to the richest part of town, at the end of University Avenue.

All the houses were very big in the area, but Alice’s was one of the biggest. Bill pulled up and I leaned out the backdoor window and fired. The pellets hit the house with a hard, wet sound. I spread the shots around the front of the house, and they left dark flowers on the side of the white wall. I kept thinking of the words crime, crime, crime,and faggot, faggot, faggot.

I was a dark agent of the night, delivering terror in the suburbs while the inhabitants slept. I was evil in anyone’s eyes, but in high school, underhanded action rules.

After Alice’s we wanted more so we shot some other houses. We shot Jerry’s house because he ditched me as a friend, and Eli Fox’s house because he was an annoying guy Howard knew from Hebrew school, and Anna Zimmerman’s house because she had a big crush on me and had no chin. She had given me the bear that we burned.

Later we got caught because Howard’s mom found paint on his clothes. She was a friend of Eli Fox’s parents. The Foxes turned us in and we had to do community service. Jerry called me a fag to my face in front of everyone at school, but he was too scared to start a fight. And I heard that Alice kept doing the gay dance about me.

*   *   *

Some people when they were young shot deer, and foxes. Faulkner shot a bear, Hemingway shot lions and a lot of things. Gangs shoot people for initiation.

We shot animals, and people. But they were all small animals, and we didn’t kill anyone.