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It Feels Like THIS

Rick and his step-brother Howard wanted to run away from home. Their plan was to pack their sleeping bags and hitchhike to Palm Springs, where they said people would let them sleep on their front yards because the hotels were booked for spring break. They cornered me in a hallway of our junior high school as I was leaving math class. "You comin' with us?" Howard asked. "Or are you a kissie?" He puckered up his lips and squinted his eyes. So I had to say yes. I was supposed to sneak out of my house at 3 in the morning and meet them at the freeway on-ramp at 3:30. But that night, their parents heard them planning the trip and their dad called my dad to tell him. My dad asked me if I were really going to do it, and I told him no, of course not, my friends had pressured me to say yes and if they'd asked me about it later I would've said I got caught by my parents. My dad walked away without saying anything, but I like to think his non-response was a show of respect for my strategy. Truth is, the whole concept of running away was unthinkable to me. I had no need to undertake the type of adventure Rick and Howard were after, and I had nothing bad to run away from.

But there were other kids who did. I was in gym class with Neil Lovely. He had a round face, short black curly hair and heavy eyelids, and he wore a permanent, thick-lipped lazy smile. He'd been absent for a couple of days. The gym teacher called his name every morning when we had lined up for roll call, but got no answer. Then one day he caught himself.

"Oh yes, the Lovely boy," the gym teacher said. "He'll be away for a while."

"Yeah," a kid named Corey blurted from a couple of rows away from me. "He got shot."

Lovely got shot? I wondered how that happened. I knew he went to Hebrew school at Temple Solael with some of my friends. So I asked around, and Dan told me Neal had run away from home. He had hitchhiked north to San Jose, snuck into a back yard and curled up in the bushes to sleep.The property owner heard him, went out with a gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up. Neal was too scared to move, so the man shot into the bushes. Neal got his spleen blown out. He was in the hospital.

He came back about a month later. I was standing next to him at the gate of the P.E. field, waiting for the bell to signal we could leave. Ted came up to him and asked: "Hey Lovely, what does it feel like, getting shot?" Lovely took his pen, held it out toward Ted and gave him a sharp poke in the gut. "It feels like THIS," he said. Ted doubled over by reflex, winced and giggled.

The next year, in high school, I made friends with a drummer named Rob, whose misshapen legs and arms were frozen stiff after numerous childhood surgeries to correct birth defects. I introduced him to a bass player named Matt and they formed a band. Matt later told me that Rob was not only the best bossa nova drummer he'd ever played with, but the best bossa nova drummer he'd ever heard. I couldn't disagree. But Rob partied more than he played drums. One day during my first year of college, Rob was sitting in Dave's pickup, parked at the top of a canyon overlooking the valley. They were taking bong hits. Dave got out of the truck to pee. But he didn't lock the emergency brake, and the truck rolled over the side with Rob inside, and crashed into a tree at the bottom. Rob broke all his limbs. It would take him months to recover. He couldn't go anywhere or do much of anything besides smoke a lot of pot, so I tried to visit him when I could.

One day between college classes I ran into Kolby. She'd been friends with Rob and me in high school, and I told her what had happened and asked her if she wanted to come over to his place with me to cheer him up. She said yes, so we went.

So Kolby, Rob and I took bong hit after bong hit that afternoon, with the stereo playing Weather Report's "I Sing the Body Electric" album and the TV turned on with the sound off. Wayne Shorter's saxophone was blurting and squealing over the pops and boings of the bass notes while the TV showed something that looked like a commercial for a carpet store. A man had placed a tool on the floor against the wall and it appeared he was using it to staple the carpet by bashing it with his knee as hard as he could. We watched and agreed it was an incredibly violent commercial. Then we looked at each other realizing that the commercial seemed to be going on and on, longer than any other commercial we'd ever seen.

"Wow," I said. "This is a really long commercial."

And it didn't stop, even after I'd said that. It must have been repeated accidentally, but with the sound off, we couldn't tell. The three of us looked at each other, wondering what was going on.

"This commercial is so long," I said, "I can't even believe it."

I loaded the bong again, passed it to Kolby and fired it up while she smoked another bowlful of weed, the bongwater bubbling as the man on TV continued to smash the carpet stapler with his knee.Then the carpet commercial was interrupted by a news bulletin. The bottom of the TV screen bore the legend "Los Angeles: Breaking News" and an anchor spoke to us, though we couldn't hear him. What we did hear was Ralph Towner's moody acoustic guitar playing on "The Moors." Then the TV screen showed images of people covered with blood being wheeled into waiting ambulances. Then a man with blood running down the side of his head spoke into a microphone, gesturing nervously. Coverage of this carnage continued for a few minutes. Then it stopped, but instead of returning to the carpet commercial, the TV showed what seemed like normal programming, a rerun of a situation comedy. Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat into the air.

The next morning I picked up the newspaper and read a headline at the top of Page 1 of the Metro section: Student Slain in Gun Attack at Computer School. Oh, that must've been what I saw on TV yesterday, I said to myself. So I read the article:

A berserk young honor student with a shotgun killed one classmate and wounded seven other people in a Wilshire District computer school Thursday before he was shot and seriously injured by a security guard, police said.

The gunman, Neal Lovely, was sitting at the back of the room while the rest of the class was taking a 10-minute quiz and he calmly loaded a shotgun he had brought to the school hidden in a long box. He then stood up and started shooting without warning.

"I saw his face," said Derek Mayar, one of the students in the class. "There was no expression on his face. Then people starting running to the front of the room and out the door.I looked behind me and saw him shooting."

The rest of the article indicated that Lovely had some problems fitting in with the group and had felt he was being teased. He had carved his initials in the briefcase of a classmate named Paster two weeks before, then threatened the other student with the knife. When confronted by school administrators, he dismissed the incident as a joke. When he started shooting, though, he called Paster's name, and the name of another student and shot them both. The injured students, covered with blood, staggered out of the school and onto the set of a TV show that was filming outside, which explains the video we saw on TV the day before. A security guard from the show chased Lovely down the hall, they exchanged gunfire, and both were wounded.

I wondered what Lovely was thinking while he cracked the shotgun open and slid the two shells inside, sitting there in the back of the classroom as the other students answered questions about computer programming. I wondered what he was thinking while he shot at them, reloaded, and shot again, reloaded and ....

OK, you assholes, you all thought you were better than me, huh? You didn't think I could learn computer programming? Well, it doesn't matter now, does it? I heard you talk about how funny looking I was. I heard you joke about how I couldn't get a date to save my life. I tried to be nice. I tried to be friendly. You've treated me like shit from day one. I couldn't win with you. Well, you want to know what it's like to get shot? It feels like THIS.

A bunch of my friends from junior high met at UCLA for a jazz fusion concert featuring Brazilian singer Flora Purim and her husband, percussionist Airto Moreira. He was one of the drummers on that Weather Report album I was listening to with Kolby and Rob a few days earlier, while we watched the aftermath of Neal's shooting rampage on TV without knowing what we were seeing. I asked my friends if they'd heard about Neal. They all had.

"Isn't that insane?" Mike said.

I joked with Dan, asking him if he thought that Neal was jealous because other people had spleens and his was shot out so he wanted to even the score. Dan looked at me funny, and said:

"You're sick."

I felt bad.

A couple of months later, I told the story of Neal to Tony, who was a projectionist at the porno theater where I worked that summer. Tony was older, he'd traveled across Europe and he'd read a lot of books and so he knew a lot about life. I asked him what he thought would happen to Neal. He said he'd get sent to the state hospital for the criminally insane, locked in a room with a mattress on the floor, and they wouldn't let him out for a long, long time.

I remembered what the gym teacher said that day: Oh, the Lovely boy. He'll be away for a while.

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