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Remembrance of Seventh Periods Past

I don't know why I'm thinking about this. Well, actually I do. I woke up feeling sick again. It's the weirdest thing, no matter how much I drink the night before, for the first instant when my eyes open in the morning, before my brain tries to splash to a start and before my limbs proclaim their distress, I can actually lull myself into thinking that there will be no hangover. For one glorious second I actually forget that a third bottle was opened, a second trip was made to the deli, etc., and I actually believe I'll be able to do the work I was planning on doing, that I'll be able to run the errands I need to run, etc., without feeling run-down and white-trash low. But then the dog is on top of me, licking my face, mad to go out and piss, and anyway, no longer being 15 (or 19, or 25, for that matter), my body won't allow me to just sleep on until noon when the gloopiness will (hopefully) be gone.

So feeling sick again, I remember a line I read in a short story about the way drunks live in a parallel universe. You know, you're on the subway with a throbbing head, gutting through all sorts of the usual cliched self anger and regret and you're just hating all the healthy self-confident fuzzy pink bastards all primed for another day of fucking up the world before they head off for 'social' drinks and slobbering up oysters off the buttocks of naked Japanese waitresses. Actually, that last bit seems to be another topic, one for another time. Getting back to this, it all started with me feeling gloopy again, and sick of it, and tired of it, and mad about it, and of course, thinking about it: Is it me genes, is it me mind, is it me muther? Don't go getting worried though, this won't be yet another tedious exercise of self-analysis by yet another reformed (or soon to be, dammit) drunk. Or maybe it will be--who can tell so early in the going? It's just that I was thinking, and thinking fondly, of the days of yore. When drinking meant four surreptitious shots of whiskey and a glorious god-lifting buzz that floated one along for an hour or two. Out of body, out of mind, out of this snot-snickety world. And no bloody hangovers. Teenage bodies bounce back oh so wonderfully. Teenage bodies, built for lust and ball-bracing derring-do, and taking Jack Daniels in their stead. Or Jim Beam. Or cheap red wine. Or Stroh's. Say it ain't so, say it ain't so! And so, and so, and so it goes. So it went.

At 1:15 me and Ted click out of social studies class. What a fucking relief. Mr. Cellio has been gassing on about Chiang Kai Shek's mortal flaws more in-eloquently than usual--not that either of us has been listening. Sixth period drags. Especially on Fridays. I was watching the minute hand for ten minutes straight, but somehow some things and names stick. I guess there is a certain melody to those old warlord names: Chiang Kai Shek, Sun Yat Sen, and who else? Mao? Mao Tse Tung just doesn't have the same roll or ring. But nothing beyond the melody of the names sinks in. And we are convinced that Mr. Cellio is a whacko. We get endless laughs about his half-baked Commie tendencies and his failure to secure a Japanese wife. He actually admitted this to a room full of ninth graders: he went to Japan in his youth to find a wife. He came back alone. 'What a fucking loser!' was the giddy reaction. "What does your wife now think about that?" one girl asked. "I'm not married," he answered. More wild laughter. Anyway, Mr. Cellio teaches us the history of the world beyond America, beyond Europe. Sixth period social studies. From 12:33 until 1:15 we are his unwilling prisoners, the blank slates upon which he tries to splatter his Mao lust and Nippon crush. But it is Friday, which is why we are more itchy and scratchy then usual. Fridays are meaningful to fourteen-year-olds, especially when seventh period is free.

So sixth period has banged dead, the bell is a siren of mercy and we're out the door with our brains quickening and itching and we amble down to the lockers to dump our books so we can wander around empty handed, pretending we don't care about school, pretending that we are burn-outs or metal heads, even though we're in all the honors classes and even though we're only fourteen but well on our way to small four-year New England Catholic liberal arts colleges, and gobs of glory and wealth and success beyond that, or something like that.

It's fucking Friday, man, Friday, and seventh period is free. Has been all year. Forty-two minutes to kick and kill before we have to shuffle off to Spanish.

So...you give a pack of fourteen-year-old whackers and hackers forty-two minutes to kill and drill and guess what they're going to spill? Depends on the kid, some might say... (This is back in the day, I should add, way back when they still entrusted high school kids with free time. I'm sure all that is dead and gone, withered away now with that sick Columbine song.) Entirely depends on the child, I would say. "Tuesday's child is happy with a needle and a spoon," I think is how Mick put it once. Or maybe not. So what's what when you got brain to burn and a burn to brain? All you need is a bit o' time to do the braining. So milling around the ugly yellow lockers by the auditorium it was all foreordained, right? We're standing around in this acne-choked, adolescent-charged air and it is all so fucking strange. And that shit is not a cliché. It is strange. Strange beyond the mangling attempt of these words to set it straight in some fashion that will make you understand. Though you should understand, since you were also probably an adolescent once. But then, as was already said, it's obvious that not all adolescents are the same. The same strange wave does not wrangle all the brave and the true. Some truck right on through that strangeness, with plan in hand; and then there are those who wallow wallow wallow...and just can never seem to get that strange smell off them. Ah, yes. A strange rupturing time. Or maybe so just for me. Maybe others weren't gouged so vividly...maybe the colors and smells didn't and don't stick to their skin...but not so for some...it's all still in the air we breath, in the skin we cede, try to shed, try to shred. Motherfuckers with Sartre-glorifying minds and tenth-grade emotions, hugging tenth-grade hurts. I know this because it all comes back to dagger me when I watch some dumb movie like Ordinary People or Dazed and Confused, or something even weaker, and it's all right back in my lap and I cringe and I'm back throwing shots at god (and throwing shots down with god) and wondering where it all started and where it went off the tracks and if there are tracks and if this is arrested development or if this is just the opening salvoes of an oncoming forty-year war against mental illness... Ha. Ha. Yep. Kind of got off the seam there. Where were we? Oh yeah, Cellio has set the clowns free,

and we're jostling in the hallways and blurting out words spoken too loudly with an eye angled towards some chickie or other's reaction. Loads of obscenities bandied about, buckshot off each other without ease and certainly without elegance. We finally get through all the guff and bluff and we're down by our lockers in the band wing. I open my locker and toss in my social studies book. Ted's already beside me and he's asking what are we gonna do? Though we know what we're gonna do, but it's a question of shaking free first. Because along with Ted there's also Bob, Sammy and Jinko and Teely and Nods and some other blank pathetic helpless faces. What are these dorks doing hanging around? What do these freaks want? Just because we're in the same dorky classes together, does that mean we have to dork around during free periods together? I want to shout all that and more, but I don't, being meek and mild, and anyway, I figure a subtler tack would be best. We got 42 minutes to kill and now we're down to 39. The seventh period late bell has sounded; the last of the people without seventh period free have scurried off.... So Ted asks what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? Others ask the same damn question, so, what are we gonna do? Does anyone want to go down to the truck for a sauce roll? Does anyone want to go to G&D's for a slice of pizza? Does anyone want to hang out in the auditorium? Does anyone know why we're alive? Ha, ha. Me and Ted know that we're going to head over to his house to kill the time, kill kill kill the time, just like we did the week before.... But to ditch the cackling cacks, therein lies the rub. We don't mind if Bob trails along, jury is still out on him. He plays guitar so he might be cool...but the others? Lost causes. Immigrants. Dorks. Losers. Nerds. What we are not. We hope.

So Ted says he's going to take a piss. It's the usual skip. I trail in behind the others as they resign themselves gleefully to spending the free period in the empty auditorium. We're hoping that Sandra, the only girl around with a killer ass who would lower herself to consort with the likes of us, might stroll by. Or that maybe G. the coolly-cool band director will grace us with a few comments. A bit of banter to make us feel like adults. Us? No. Them. I already know G. is a hypocrite whore--busting on the Polish kids and black kids when they're not around. And not sharing G.'s illustrious ethnicity I know that I am also on his shit list. But I don't care. I don't care. I'm too far gone to care...motherfucker. Yep. I look at my watch. Another 3 minutes piddled away. I drift towards the side door. Ignoring the calls of Neely, "Where you going, Dave? Dave, where you going?" Don't these people have any come-on at all? I don't answer and whip a left at the door as nonchalant as I can. I notice that Bob is with me. That's okay, I guess. Though, thankfully the rest have stayed nestled in the auditorium. To hell with them.

Me and Bob grab our jackets from our lockers and ghost through the hallway. Our school doesn't exactly exercise super surveillance in the hallways. Kids aren't supposed to be in them during periods without passes, but that is the extent of it. So we're down the hallway and out one of the side doors. Ted's standing there.

"None of them are following us."

"All right then. Let's go."

"Where we going?" Bob asks.

"To Ted's house. We'll watch TV or something."

"Cool."

Ted lives five minutes away. We three fourteen-year-olds traipse down the hill to his street, bang right and in a jiff we're at his house. We go in. Ted's parents are both working; no one is home.

Ted leads us into the den. He flicks on the TV. Nickelodeon is on.

"Oh, man, my stupid TV is always on Nickelodeon. My mom baby-sits for my nephew in the morning and all he wants to do is watch stupid Nickelodeon."

Nickelodeon is airing some kind of cartoon. Nothing familiar, it's got an educational bent, I think, and seems strangely European.

"What do you want to watch?"

"I don't know." Bob says. "What's on anyway? Soaps? It's the middle of the afternoon."

"This actually looks okay," I say.

"Yeah, kind of psychedelic, man," Bob adds.

Me and Bob sit down on the couch. Ted is flitting back and forth from the den to the kitchen. He cracks his knuckles and looks out the back window.

"Hey," he says, standing in front of the TV, "Wanna beer?"

"Sure. Why not?" Why in the hell not. After a long week of studying and such, it's the least we deserve, right? The week before and the week before that me and Ted had been in the same place doing the thing, minus Bob. Beer, sambucca, slow-gin-fizz whirl! I follow Ted's lead though, and agree with him, seeing that there's no reason to make Bob any the wiser about the trend. We both look at Bob.

"Yeah. Okay. What kind of beer do you have?"

"What? Does that make a difference? I just have what my father drinks, Michelob."

"All right, then. Sure."

Ted disappears into the kitchen and pops back in with three beers. They're twist-offs, and we crack them open and start slugging. Watching Bob out of the corner of my eye I see that he takes a tepid taste of the Michelob and sets it down on the carpet. He's busying himself with one of the those Fischer Price wind-up toys--the kind that says 'Moo. Cow. Moo' when the arrow points at the cow, 'Baa, sheep, baa' when it points at the sheep, and so on.

"Woof, dog, woof," the mechanical voice says.

"Wow. Cool. This is so cool. What's this supposed to teach your nephew? How to sound stoned?"

"Yeah, right," Ted says.

The cartoon on Nickelodeon ends. Extremely loud commercials for toys kick in. Ted motions to me.

"Hey, Dave, come here a sec," he gets up and goes into the kitchen and I follow. He puts a finger to his lips and opens the liquor cabinet over the refrigerator. Two glasses are on the counter. Without clinking so much as a bottle he reaches into the back of the cabinet and pulls out a bottle of Jim Beam, three-quarters full. He pours about three shots worth of the stuff into each glass. Then he turns on the sink and replaces the missing whiskey with a four- or five-second blast of water. He turns off the faucet and drops the bottle back into the back of the cabinet. Without a sound. Stealth bombed-out boy. Grinning like a bastard the entire time.

Some potato chips are already in a bowl. Sour cream and onion. We're not quite pros yet. This kind of straight whiskey drinking requires large volumes of backwash-taste-nullifying foodstuffs.

"Here we go, Cucaracha," he whispers gleefully. He downs the whole thing in one gulp and starts gasping. Oh Christ. Lordy, lordy. I drink off half of mine. The stuff tastes oh so bad. Acid burp burn shake spasm gag. I stuff some potato chips in my mouth. I chew down the muddle of whiskey-soft chips. Throat like a Newark gas fire. Oh glory. I finish the rest. Ted rinses out his glass, dries it and puts it back in the cupboard. Pours some more potato chips into a bowl and goes into the den.

The whiskey is in my belly, but it hasn't decided whether it's gonna stay or not. I lurch forward and gag, fighting the liquid back down. Stinking swirl. My eyes tear. I put the glass on the counter and hold on to the edge of the kitchen sink with both hands. The aluminum of the sink is cold. Cold and calming. The repulsiveness of the wave recedes. It comes back in warm. It's starting to calm. With every wave the nastiness is being replaced with the lovely lovely warmth. Love-all warmth. It's starting to settle. Glorious glorious settling. No puking today! I look out the window over the sink into Ted's backyard. A squirrel is hopping along the gray-green grass.

"Hey, Jackass, what the hell are you doing in there?" Ted calls from the den.

"Nothing, dude; just washing my hands." I rinse out the glass and put it into the cupboard beside Ted's without drying it properly. I walk back to the den.

"Washing your hands? What are you doing? Taking shits in Ted's mother's bathroom?"

I doubt that Bob will take part in our adventure next week. I sit down on the couch again, pick up what's left of my beer.

"Fuck you, man."

"Yeah, fuck me. That's pretty good, Dave. Pretty original."

"All right. Shut-a the fuck up, both of ya's!" Ted shouts. My head is starting to swim. The warmth is slushing up from belly to brain. Beginning to swim swim swim. Swimming down, down, down and then up. I notice that we're watching Family Feud. Survey says!

"Survey says giant dickweeds!"

"Survey says my ass!"

"What, are you drunk, dude?" Bob asks Ted. "From just one beer?"

"Ah, go fuck a cock, Bob. Go to the moon!"

"Go to the moon? Don't you mean 'Shoot the moon,' you retard?"

"Pish-pash my ass, Gonzo!"

Now we're rolling, rolling glory. I know exactly how Ted is feeling--he's just verbalizing it better. And Family Feud is a super-delight comedy--all the answers, right and wrong, are unbelievable funny, not that we're able to hear half of them. Could they have collected a more deranged pair of families? Half the guys look like chickens, and one of the ladies on the team in the lead looks like Miss Piggy. So me and Ted keep doing Muppet-voice imitations and we're entertaining the hell out of ourselves. Dust floats in the sunbeam through the window and the entire den is a fuzzy wonderful womb. At ten to two Bob looks at the clock.

"We better get going, dudes. It's almost time for 8th period."

"Right, right, right you are, my man!" Ted's still laughing his ass off. I start laughing some more. It's all a laugh. That fat fuck Richard Dawson is laughing. Now that dude is definitely drunk.

"Well, we better go," I offer, trying to calm down. "Don't want Mrs. Caracas getting angry at us."

"Mrs. Caracas! He said Mrs. Caracas! You mean Mrs. Carbajal!" Ted is almost unable to breathe. Bob's not in our Spanish class, so he doesn't get it. He takes French during 3rd period. Who the hell knows what class he has during 8th.

"Dios mios, Senora Carbajal! Quien es Senora Caracas?"

"Abuello, mi zapatos! Donde estan mis zapatos rojas?!"

We're both rolling on the floor. Brain has completely surrendered. And gone crystal white so so happy smiling warm to the warmth. Or something. The pale autumn sun shiny through the sliding door at the back of the den that leads into the backyard. Fucking beautiful day indeed. Bob gets up, and slyly, or so he thinks, dumps 80 percent of his Michelob down the drain in the kitchen sink.

"Hey, where do you want me to put this bottle?" he calls out.

"All right, all right. I'm coming. I'll take care of it. I'll take care of it, you goddamn dingbat!" Ted's beginning to regroup, coming down off the original cloud burst. All three of us are in the kitchen. I'm weaving but got my feet firmly planted on the white and yellow tiles. Very officious-like, Ted grabs the three empties from the draining board and heads off down into the basement. I'm weaving a bit more, and looking back out the window over the sink. The squirrel is gone. An old white lawn chair is looking lonely. It looks like it would be fun to go and sit in it. I wish I could go stretch out in the backyard, cold autumn sun and all. Bob is reading the various messages and notes that Ted's mother has stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. Ted bursts back into the kitchen from the basement.

"Mints, my man! Mints, mints, mince-meat mints! For one and for all!" He hands peppermint Lifesavers to me and Bob and we put on our jackets, collecting them from where we had dropped them on the hallway floor.

We're out on the stoop and Ted bends over to lock the door. He peers into the lock before inserting the key, looking like a demented silent-movie detective. Or arch-fiend. The air smells good. Nice not living in a city, I guess.

"Adios, mi casa, adios!"

I start to laugh but quickly catch myself. Time for business now, man. Time to get down to business. Back to school, back into those sour hallways with their gorky-dorky eyes and looks. Whatever. Whudever, friend. Amigo. Off we go! Merry Spanish for one and all.

Walking back there is a glorious glow to it all: the road beams up at us; there is a happy shine to the dead leaves and crumbly asphalt that pile up where the road meets the lawns of the houses. We trip along the edges of the lawns, standing briefly on the white stones that some people put on the edge of their property to--to keep people from driving up on their lawns, I guess?

Coming up the hill to the school I'm looking at the leave-less trees--I'm not thinking of how so-and-so is going to look at me and what what's-her-name is going to whisper and that it's going to get back to the counselor and it's going to spill out and spell out into countless lordless blackouts and twitchings and coming down to sixth-beer soggy alone on stinking Hoboken apartment nights. No, I'm not thinking about nothing, except how glorious the sun strikes the trees and how light I feel and good I feel and my body is a wick blowing and flaring out alive! Fucking alive, man! So clean, so fucking clean. I kick a pebble and laugh, Bob is well ahead of us, he stopped even trying to talk to us after we left the house and Ted's making faces at his back and then Ted's saying something gas and I'm laughing and laughing and laughing and fucking laughing so hard my guts are breaking up and splitting into a million pieces and I just fucking keep on laughing. The trees, man, the goddamn trees are laughing with us, I think Ted is saying, or maybe he's going on in Spanish again. Who knows?

And so it went. Anyway, as I finish this I've been sober for eleven days. {Took me twelve frigging days to write this mess! Can you imagine?} Not much of an achievement I guess, especially since it's not even my choice. It's just that what with school and all these bloody freelance assignments I just don't have the time for a roar. Believe you me, I'm itching for one. And I'm apt to go off at any moment. Half-cocked, full-cocked, twice-cocked, belly full of gin and none the shyer. Spencer Tracey proud. But in the meantime I'm staying the quintessential stone slo-ber gent. I figure why goose myself with two glasses of wine with dinner when it will just make me reminisce about the last time I had five, plus a six-pack of Heineken? So we'll see. We'll bide our time. Like Chiang Kai Shek and his huddled Kuomingtang fucks out on the ragged isle of Formosa, I'll bide my time and keep my eyes on the Strait. And a hearty fuck-off to all of you till I plunge again! Cheers.

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