Johnson Johnson

Johnson Johnson

It never occurred to Johnson Johnson to hate his name.  It was his grandfather’s name. Having survived a horrible ordeal at sea, his grandfather died of thirst on a river delta with river water running over his boots.  He wouldn’t drink the water because he thought it was bad. Johnson always kept his grandfather close to his heart but felt no pride in his name.  He thought it adequate, and when he heard it, he answered.

“Johnson?”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind filing this month’s batch?  Mark called in sick.”

“Yes.”

Johnson took the stack and began filing the carbon papers into a cabinet by name.  He answered ‘yes’ because it sounded nice at the end of a question.  It took everything he had, to say, “No,” when appropriate, and he didn’t often have that much.

He wore his hair the way carrots wear their stalks.  It simply came out of his head and hung over his eyes and ears, ready to obscure them at any moment.  He had a young face the color of paper, with a nose in the middle like a boat’s rudder.  His ears looked like two halves of a danish stuck to his head, two sinks catching sound from everywhere and stuffing it into his head for thinking out.  When he thought things out, his big moon eyes rolled up to the ceiling and read what he wanted to think in the stucco.  His neck, meanwhile, stretched out to make the reading easier for his eyes and the catching and stuffing easier for his ears.  People often said Johnson looked like someone famous, but no one ever remembered who.  An actor, apparently.

Johnson wiped his forehead.  His hands and arms smelled like carbon paper, a scent he would have scoffed at, once, not believing it to be a real smell at all.  Now, having worked in the office for over six years, he understood that carbon paper had a presence like ambient light, sticking to and ebbing from everything it landed on, and it landed on everything.  Johnson once detected a sheaf of carbon paper in a stack of magazines in a neighbor’s garage.  He smelled carbon on his clothes, and in his car, and, like a blast of heat from an open door, he smelled it at work.

Johnson worked after the office employees went home.  He came each day an hour before they left and filed all the papers they’d generated during business hours, and each would extend well-wishes to Johnson Johnson on their way out.

“Have a nice night, Johnson.”

“Say, don’t work too hard, Johnson.”

“Take it easy, man.”

“G’night, Johnson.”

Johnson would agree with them, one-by-one.

“Yes.  Yes, I won’t.  I will.  You, too.”

They would lock him in and turn on the security system.  Opening any door or window triggered it.  When the workers returned in the morning, they entered a code.  It stopped the alarm from sounding.  Johnson Johnson did not have the code.  He wondered if they would ever give the code to him.  It seemed unlikely, somehow.

He found catalogues on the desks of the female employees to masturbate to.  It gave him added thrill to jerk off in the ladies’ room.

The employees let him out at three, and he went home to eat and sleep.  After sleeping, Johnson showered, ate, and went to work wondering where those hours went.  Eight hours of work, plus eight hours of sleep, and eight hours he somehow spent eating, driving and showering comprised a life for him.  Johnson did not mind.  He did not notice.

Ring!  Alarm clock and shower water, toilet, shower and shampoo, check email, eggs, toast, mostly email, go to work and come home, microwaveable pasta cable television.  The hour before sleep set in was the one he filled with what he really wanted.  Sometimes he ate junk food and played video games, or watched porno and jerked off, or drank soda and read popular books, and sometimes he simply spent that time taking longer to do everything that needed doing; in fact, he did this more often than not, and he spent the rest of his time chastising his self for it.

Johnson had a date with a homely woman on Friday.  When Friday came around, he met her at a coffee shop, where they interrogated each other until enough information changed hands for them to consider themselves friends.

“What’s your favorite album?”

“You mean, ever?”

“Yeah, favorite album ever.”

“I listen to music, sometimes.  What’s yours?”

“Ten, by Pearl Jam.”

“I’ve heard that, I think.”

“Well, what’s yours?”

“That was a good one.”

He felt like they were friends.  They went to dinner, then for drinks, and at one point in the evening, Johnson’s date decided to leave him.  Johnson sat in a chair near the door and watched her flirt with the bartender.  He decided to go home.  He’d had a beer, so he called a cab to take him to his apartment.  He requested a driver who’d driven him several times before and had to wait an hour for him.  He avoided meeting new people if he could help it.  He tipped the driver two dollars.

Johnson used the elevator to reach the second floor.  He swayed at his door, unable to tell if he’d had too much to drink or only felt like it.  He fumbled his keys, and couldn’t get the one he needed into the lock.  He pressed on it and slipped, and his nose slammed into the doorframe.  Blood spattered his face, shirt, and hands.

“Aieee!” said Johnson Johnson.

He shrank to the floor of the apartment building like a sack of returned mail and bled.  He touched his eyelids as though thankful he hadn’t blinded himself.  He wanted to be in bed, to make the day go away, but the thought of trying the key again made his neck and shoulders tighten.  He checked his watch.  In half an hour he would be sober enough to try again.

Johnson woke up to the feeling of hands shaking him.

“Aieee!” said Johnson Johnson.

It was his neighbor, Sandra.  She worked late as a nurse in a home for the severely handicapped.  He’d fallen asleep, and the sight of him crumpled and bloody on the floor had horrified her.  She had to take him in, had to clean him up.

“Yes!  No, thank you – I’ll be fine!” said Johnson.

Sandra plucked him up and thrust him onto her couch.  Johnson kicked himself up, but she pressed him back into the cushions, throwing powder blue sheets and a large quilt over him.  She brought a warm, moist towel and wiped dried blood from his face.

“Aren’t you lucky I found you, instead of Mr. Rule?”

“Yes,” said Johnson from around the towel, which grew cold.

She folded the bedclothes down, unbuttoned his shirt, and jerked it out from under him with the agility of someone much younger.  Before he knew what had happened, Johnson lied there shirtless.  She stepped back, holding his blood-splattered shirt to her bosom as if something had bit her.

“I’d, I’d, I’d really rather –” he said.

“You’ll be staying on the couch, tonight, Mr. Johnson,” said Sandra.

She stood behind him, out of sight, blinking.  Tears sat on the ridge of her lids and sparkled.  Her salt-and-pepper hair shook as a shiver wracked her body.

“On the couch,” she repeated.  She gaped at him.

Johnson’s skin darkened at his neckline, became a light brown as if he often went out in the sun masked.  His chest, like a plateau, flattened and dropped in two slight ridges, presiding over a valley between his ribs where muscles rolled like rows of twin hills.  His physique looked painted on his lean frame, and she noticed the sinews of his arms twining up into angled shoulders, where the muscle crossed in tendons into his neck and became skinny wires, as though someone had traded his head for someone else’s.

Johnson felt her eyes on him and yanked the sheets up under his chin.  Sandra moved into the kitchen before he could see the look on her face.  She poured tea into cups and set them on a tray.  She heard the front door close.

The next afternoon, Johnson put his clothes on and walked out the door.  He met the mailman there.

“Hello, Mr. Johnson,” the mailman said.

Johnson’s face flushed, and he retreated to his apartment without saying a word.  He did not go to work that evening.  He spent the half hour it usually took to drive there peering out of his window at cars driving by, and pedestrians on the sidewalk, and when he saw someone look up at him, he would dart away from the curtains and return when he felt sure the person had passed.  He looked at buildings across the street, and at traffic lights.  He studied the lines dividing the lanes.

He saw more cars turning onto his street than turned off of it.  He counted.  The opposite side of the street lurked in shade and broken streetlamps, while his side remained bright.  He noticed a cluster of potholes in front of his apartment for the first time.  Cars slowed over them like drivers ogling an accident.  They slowed beneath his window, and passengers occasionally saw him.  Johnson looked away.

He got into bed and used his remote to trigger the television, pulling the sheets up to his chin.  He waited for the phone to ring and formulated responses to give his boss.

“Yes, Ma’am.  I’ll be fine to work tomorrow.  Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Yes, Ma’am.  I might still be sick, but I won’t know until tomorrow.”

“Yes, Ma’am.  I can’t work tomorrow.”

His boss never called.  No one did.  He turned the television off and slept through his shift.

He felt the morning sun on his cheek and got up, dripping sweat.  Getting out of bed, he saw a silhouette of himself on the mattress.  A misty halo faded around the crown of his head where he had lolled side to side in his sleep.  It made a perfect ring.  He showered, shaved, and fried eggs.  He stood stunned before the stove and stared long at the sunshine that crawled steadily across the bed towards the window.  It warmed and brightened the apartment.  He ate, made his bed for the first time in years, and dressed in trousers and a white v-neck tee.  He’d thought the trousers too small, but, what do you know?  They fit.

Johnson Johnson drove to the library to check out something popular.  He spoke to the librarian.

“Yes, excuse me — can you recommend something popular?”

As it turned out, all the popular books were already out, but Johnson was welcome to put his name on the list.  He decided on something unpopular, instead.  He got 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne.

He drove to the beach, where he thought the atmosphere would be nice, and took his socks and shoes off.  He felt the sand between his toes.  The waves hit his ears with a tide of noise that rose as he walked towards the ocean.  When he reached the edge of the soft sand, he looked at the sparkling sun on the peaks of the ceaseless saltwater and sat down.  He watched the movements of the people in the surf until they repeated themselves, then lay with his head back on the hot sand and began to read, using the book as a shade.

Yes, thought Johnson after a few chapters.  The harpooner was right – there are no such things as monsters.

He read the entire novel, stretched, and went home to shower.

He discovered a thick, impenetrable shell on the back of his skull while shampooing his hair.  He had laid his head into a mass of melted bubble gum.  He dried off and examined himself in the mirror.  The situation looked hopeless.  Johnson Johnson stared at his pupils.  They twitched and dilated.  He watched them as he shaved his head.  Having done, he looked to himself like an urn with the lid on, with ears for handles.  His scalp gleamed all the whiter for the rosy color his face had got despite using Jules Verne as a shield.  Naked and shaven before the foggy mirror, his head shined.

Johnson decided to go out for drinks alone, something he’d heard alcoholics do.  It was a special night to do anything other people do, because he felt like anyone but himself.  He stopped and stared in shock each time he passed his reflection.  Nothing he wore looked the same with his new haircut.  He decided to wear black trousers, a tee shirt, and black shoes.  He knew he would match that way.

He walked to the bar and saw every stool occupied.  He stood, instead.  People watched him.  He noticed.  He folded his hands and set them on the bar.

“Hey, Swizzle Stick!” called a large man at the end, “when you get a second?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the bartender, chewing one of the plastic drink stirrers.

Johnson’s nostrils flared.  He looked at the bartender.

“What can I get you,” the bartender said.

“Anything,” said Johnson.

The bartender gazed through him.

“Wine?  Beer?  Margarita?”

Johnson said, “Anything.”

“Anything.”

“Yes.”

The bartender poured dark liquor into a shot glass.  Johnson drank it down in three swallows, coughed, and looked at the bartender’s creased face through tears that sat on his eyelids like crows.  The bartender raised his eyebrows.

“Again?”

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

The bartender smiled.

Two hours later, Johnson Johnson realized he’d never been drunk.  His surroundings moved like a shuffled stack of photographs.  He turned his back to the bar, supporting himself on his elbows.  The place had gotten busy, and the only berth in the room was around Johnson.  A man wearing a loose tie bumped into him, and Johnson, heavy with drink, moved like the pyramids.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” the man said, and left his stool.  The stool sat empty for some time, before a brunette with sleeve tattoos, black pigtails, and bangs sat there, looking at Johnson like he should notice.

“Hi,” she eventually said.

“Yes?” said Johnson, looking straight ahead.

She took his chin and turned his face to her.

“I’m fuckin’ talking to you,” she said.

Johnson’s head wavered in her hand.

“Yes,” he said.

“What’re you doin’?” she said.

Johnson grimaced and pulled his chin away.  He searched for words and found none.

“I’m fuckin’ talking to you,” said Johnson Johnson.

The brunette laughed.

“Not like that, you’re not,” she said, turning him by the waist to face her.

“See?” she said.  She looked at him.  “Do you think I look like Betty Page?  People say I look like Betty Page.”

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

“Well, alright,” said the girl, putting an unpainted hand on his stomach.  Her face softened.

“Hey. . .” she said.

Her hand went up his shirt.  Johnson grabbed the bar behind him and went rigid.  His eyes became hard-boiled eggs and his boat-rudder nose twitched like a palpitating heart.

“You’re holding out on me,” she said.

The sinews in Johnson’s arms pulled and he moved to snatch her hand away, but he almost fell trying to let go of the bar.  She pulled her hand from under his shirt.

“Do you know Sandra?” she said.

“What?” said Johnson Johnson.  “Sandra?”

“Do you know her?”

“Yes.  My neighbor’s name is Sandra.  You know her?”

“I recognize you.  She showed me your picture.”

Johnson dropped his hands.  The ridge of his naked head bobbed as he gulped.

“She showed you a picture?”

Had she taken a picture of him?  He didn’t remember a camera, and he’d certainly never given her one.  Why would she have it?  And if she had taken a photo of him lying on her couch, that was only a day ago.  She was showing people?  People like this?

“I’m Sue,” she said.

“You saw a picture?” said Johnson.

“Forget the picture.  I want shots.  What do you want to drink?”

He looked at a picture of Raquel Welch that hung on the wall.  She seemed to be laughing at him.  At two, the bartender handed him his tab.  Johnson smelled the second copy and winced.

“Carbon paper,” he said.

Sue laughed.

“You’re so weird!” she said.

Johnson went home with her.  Her apartment smelled like potpourri and had empty beer bottles with candles in them everywhere.  An expensive entertainment system sat like an ancient statue in the corner of her living room, framed by black leather couches.  A magazine with Demi Moore on it rested on the coffee table.  Johnson Johnson looked around the apartment like a tourist.

Sue made love to him.  She leaned him against the refrigerator, stood him against the wall, sat him on the couch, laid him on his back.  He felt it happen.  He watched it happen.  His body became his whole world, inhabiting him like a spider’s web inhabits the spider.  He knew things about himself nothing but a night with a woman could ever have taught.  He felt weight leaving his spine.  She rode him, rocking forward and back.  He watched sweat bead between her breasts and roll down her stomach.  Her hair stuck to her cheeks and neck, and swung in time.  His hands, scarred from scores of paper cuts, mesmerized him as they reached up and took her breasts.  He stared at her flesh in his hands, white as cream, and looked past them at her face, which contorted in a confused stir of strain, aggression and joy, her eyebrows arched and her teeth bared, red lipstick smeared in a blur at the side of her mouth.  She placed his hand on her neck and held it there.  He squeezed.  His hand seemed to go all the way around her.  Her pubic hair scraped his pelvis raw.

She struck him.

He squeezed.  Her hair whipped his face.

“Fuck me,” she said.

Johnson lifted her with his hips, felt a sting build from his guts into his dick and clenched his teeth at the thought of ending.

“No,” said Johnson Johnson.

She struck him again, smiling.

“Fuck me,” she said.

“No,” said Johnson.

She seized him by the wrists and bit into his neck, her legs splayed out behind her and convulsing.  He thrust into her and cursed into her ear and poured himself into her, everything into her, into her.  Into her.

Sue’s breathing changed.  Her weight on him, slick and smooth, made his abdomen shudder.  The fragrance from her lipstick mixed with their sex smell like rose petals crushed into a locker room floor.  Her hair was in his mouth.  It tasted salty.  Good.

Johnson woke up inside her.  The morning came and went.

Johnson’s height surprised him when he next saw himself.  He saw a shadow on his head like a beard, a split lip, shadows beneath his eyes.  The neck of his tee-shirt hung stretched and distended.  Sue’s lipstick marked it like bloodstains on a revolutionary flag.

Johnson Johnson acted natural with Sue, and soon his life became a role.  They dated constantly and people said both their names when mentioning either.  Nighttime meant life.  Johnson quit going to work and went out every night.  Sue usually went with him.  Weeks went by.

His boss called to say his work had been shared with the daytime employees, and they had no position for him, anymore.  His absence had not been noted.  He called them up and asked to speak to the woman who hired him.  They’d not spoken since his employment.

“Hello, Mr. Johnson?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

The next time he went out with Sue, he managed to spill two drinks and break a glass, but the more drunk he became, the straighter he stood, like a boat’s mast in a storm, so the bar allowed him to destroy himself without so much as a warning.  The night someone else accosted him, he stood straight up.  The short blonde did as Sue had done, running her hand under his shirt, but his arm was around Sue, herself, so he did not clutch the bar as he had before.

“Oh, my,” said the blonde.

“Um, yes,” said Johnson.  “I’m with Sue.”

“No, you’re not,” said Sue, kissing his cheek.  “This is Nicole.”

Nicole looked up at him.

“You’re tense,” she said.

“Yes,” said Johnson.

She took Johnson home.  He spent most of the night on his back.  She blacked his eye and split his lip again.  He left her sleeping in the middle of the night.

Time passed.  Johnson needed to do his laundry.  In his apartment complex’s laundry room, he recognized a middle-aged blonde woman.  She came on to him.

“You’re Sandra’s neighbor, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

“Don’t be shy,” she said.  “I won’t hurt you.”

She hurt him.  His face, ridged and mottled with cuts and bruises, some fresh, some almost healed, resembled a boxer’s.  Johnson began to wonder if he should move away.  When a young lady accosted him at the supermarket, he decided to have a talk with Sandra.  Rather than knock on her door, he waited in silence in his living room to hear the door to the foyer open, then he waylaid her at the top of the stairs.

“Have, have, did, you, well-” said Johnson.  “Do you have a picture of me?”

Sandra laughed and went past him to her door, setting down sacks of groceries.

“Not anymore,” she said, her keys jingling.

“Not anymore?”

“I gave it away,” she laughed.

“You – you took a picture of me?”

She turned and took him by the shoulders.  He shrank.

“Johnson,” she said.  “Yes.”

She laughed again and left him there.  He could hear her laughing in her apartment.

Now what would he do?  The photo could be anywhere, passing from hand to hand, under eye and inspection.  He could never be himself again.  Who had it?  Who could he ask?  Johnson felt a thrill up his back.  Something had changed.

Unless I’m mean to every girl I meet, they’ll never leave me alone.

Sue told him she didn’t like the way he dressed, and bought him jeans and a forty-dollar tee shirt.  He wore them out with her that night, and they had a good time.  The next day, she left him in bed for work.  When he was certain she had gone, he nailed the blue jeans to her front door, and cut the collar and sleeves off the shirt.  He ignored her calls and wondered when he’d see her again.

He saw Nicole at the bar, first.

“Hey, you,” she said, pressing close to him, hand under his shirt.  “Missed you the other morning.”

“Yes.”

“Buy me a drink?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

When the bartender came around, he ordered a rusty nail.

“Oh,” said Nicole, “you forgot my drink.”

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

He tended to forget her drink all night.

“Why are you being such an asshole?” she said.

“I’m sorry, what?” said Johnson Johnson.  “I couldn’t hear you.”

Nicole was looking at him through slits when Sue showed up.  When she saw Johnson standing with Nicole, she glared at both of them.  Then she smiled, like a loaded gun.  She saw his cut-up tee shirt and took him by the belt.

“I need him for a second,” she said, and pulled him out to the parking lot.

They didn’t talk.

She opened the trunk of her car and withdrew the jeans.  The tops of the nails still showed in the legs where he’d tacked them up.

“Put them on,” she said.

Johnson looked at the nails, then back at her.  She struck him.

“Put them on,” she said.

He took them from her, and stepped toward the public bathroom.  She stuck her leg out and he fell.  She rolled him over and stepped on his stomach.

“Put them on, Johnson.”

“Yes,” he said.

She didn’t let him up.  It was hard to do with her standing on him.  People stared in shock, and some hurried away.  Nails stabbed his legs from ankle to waist when they walked in together.

“Rad fashion statement,” said Nicole as they approached her.

“F-fuck you,” said Johnson.

She rubbed up to him, grinding nails into his thigh.  Then she threw her arms around his neck, kissed him, and kneed him in the groin.

“Hey, Swizz,” said Sue to the bartender, “Could we get three Jack n’ Cokes, please?  On Johnny’s tab.”

Johnson Johnson became Johnny Johnson.  Just like that.

He lost his apartment before he knew what happened, because he hadn’t paid the rent.  It took four months before the landlord noticed.  He slept at Sue’s, and sometimes at Nicole’s.  He ate their food.

One night, as he laid on Nicole’s couch and gazed at the television, he smelled carbon paper.  He followed his nose to her desk drawer and opened it.  It brimmed with manila envelopes stuffed with receipts.  He gagged.

Carbon paper.

Images of his old life surfaced in his mind like the coils of a sea serpent.  He saw cubicle dividers and cheap, hard carpet, coffee in Styrofoam cups, computer screens and fluorescent lighting, and he heard bad office music permeating every inch of every room, every hallway, every elevator.  He saw himself trying to open the door to get some air, finding it locked, trying to guess the code that opened it, night after night.  He smelled carbon paper like an old paperback dipped in rubbing alcohol.

Johnson left and came back.  He had a canister of kerosene.  He poured it into Nicole’s toilet until the clear liquid almost ran over.  He left a trail of receipts to the bathroom where he tossed a ball of them in the toilet with a match and stood back.  The flames leapt.  He turned on the fan.  Smoke puffed up and smoked into the vent like a tornado upside-down.  The ball of carbon paper vanished, fluttering like fiery origami pigeons all around him, and he flushed the toilet.  He watched flames make a single spiral around the bowl and flicker at the mouth of the plumbing.  The porcelain was black with streaked soot.

Nicole found him standing before the toilet with the lights off, fire leaping from the toilet bowl.  An array of twinkling paper cinders hovered by his head, which reflected firelight in the medicine cabinet’s mirror.  If not for the thin smile that split his smudged face and turned up at the corners like an Italian moustache, if not for the whites of his eyes shimmering orange beneath their lids, she would have railed at him.  As it was, Nicole backed away.  She watched Johnny move into the living room and sweep the trail of receipts into his arms and chuck them into the toilet.  She didn’t see him empty the kerosene into it, but she heard the can clatter into the bathtub, saw the light of flame in the mirror, and put her cellphone to her ear.

“Hello, Sue?” she said.  “Your boyfriend’s crazy.”

The dynamic changed between Sue, Nicole, and Johnny Johnson.  When they walked with him, he no longer trailed behind.  They kept at his sides where they could see him.  They lit his cigarettes, rather than let him have a lighter.  They stopped pressing the nails of his blue jeans into his legs, even though he kept wearing them.  After a month, the jeans had bloodstains around the knees and above the pockets.  In bed, they abused him less as he struck back more frequently.  Sue had to wear sunglasses to work one day.  She stopped beating him altogether.  Nicole stopped when she pushed him onto the bed and found him suddenly upright and throwing her to the floor.  Things changed.

Nicole wrote love poems to him.  They were awful, but Johnson Johnson didn’t know.  He memorized them.  He shouted them in the shower like sermons.  He couldn’t sing.

One night, the register tape at the bar spilled over the counter like two tongues, a white paper copy and a yellow carbon copy.  Nicole wrote “I ♥ U” in lipstick on the strip.  Johnny read it and smiled like dominos.  Then, snatching a matchbook from the cocktail station, struck a match and set the strip on fire.  It melted the digital screen on the register before a waitress put a wet rag over it.  The bar filled with acrid smoke and smelled like a plastic factory.

The girls fled with Johnny Johnson before the cops arrived.  Swizz, the bartender, described him as a built skinhead with nails in his clothes, with two girls who had caused trouble at the bar before.  The skinhead had thrown a plastic cup of swizzle sticks at him before leaving.  The cops charged him with arson, and with assault on account of the swizzle sticks.  Johnny Johnson was a wanted man.

They drove to San Francisco.

“We can set him up and ditch him there,” whispered Sue to Nicole.

“We can’t do that to Johnny,” said Nicole.

“What the fuck, why can’t we?  You realize he’s completely insane, right?  Right?”

“Don’t say that.”

Sue looked at her.

“Fuck.  Nicole, you said it first.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did!  On the phone.  You know, when he was setting your house on fire?”

“He didn’t set my house on fire.”

Sue tapped her foot.

“What.  What is it?” said Sue.  “What the fuck is it?”

Nicole was pregnant.

Sue and Nicole arrived at the city with Johnson Johnson and got a room in an awful part of town.  A derelict slept in the concrete hallway, and lights flickered.  Remnants of wallpaper stuck to the walls and curled.  They passed three young men at the foot of the stairwell taking belts from a paper bag.

“Hum.”

“Can smell it.”

“What’s up, what’s up, ladies?”

“Damn.”

“Unh.”

“What’s up, no hello or nothing?”

“Damn.”

“Unh.”

The room’s window was open to the night when they entered.  It had bars across it.  Half the curtains were missing.  An undersized blanket hung half off the bowed and bumped mattress, and a corner of carpet folded back to expose carpet nails and rotted wooden flooring.

Nicole and Sue left to get liquor and ice.  Nicole came back.  Sue did not.  Johnny drank like the sun wouldn’t come up.  Nicole did not.  Johnny woke up after the sun had gone down the next day, disoriented, and without nails in his jeans.

“You need to get a job today,” said Nicole.

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.

A church hired him as a night janitor.  He vacuumed and mopped, sponged and swept, and bagged countless garbage cans, big and small.  Johnson Johnson grinned as he cleaned.  The trash never let up, and though people he did not know constantly complained to his superior that he’d missed a spot, that he always missed that spot, his superior seemed jaded to the complaints and relayed them to Johnson like an anchorman in disbelief of the headlines.  Each day he showed up someone remained late to whine and cry and bawl about something he could not fathom, and it was all he could do to say,

“Yes.  Yes.  Yes, it’s okay, please, I’ll make it better.”

He knew they would leave, though.  Afterward he would go about his business like a bicycle chain.  He loved his job.  Day after day, though, the bitching.  His back hurt after the third month, from the added weight of his utility belt, which suspended a hammer, wrench, and spray bottles.  He felt the weight in the early morning hours of his shift and groaned.

Johnson ate nightly from the refrigerator in the church kitchen.  It had leftovers from charity events and weddings and various other functions, and he enjoyed everything from bundt cake to microwaved filet mignon with capers.  One night, the food made him sick.

He sat in the ladies’s room as he had in his days as a filing clerk, trying alternately to start and stop the dilations of his backside.  Dull, internal pain throbbed and tore in his bowels, and he breathed in gasps and rhythms as sweat poured off him in spite of the relentless air conditioning.  When it had finished and the stuff inside him had come out, what he wiped from himself was like mucus.  Then he felt better than he ever remembered feeling in his life.  He decided to leave early, fished out his keys to lock up, and realized he’d been given keys.

When he got home, Nicole had gone out.  A note on the refrigerator in a strange and official hand said she was at a hospital.

Nicole birthed his child.  Johnson married her.  Nobody came to the wedding but their baby, because nobody had been invited.  When they kissed, the minister clapped, and Friday was a fine thing to Johnson Johnson just then.

They watched the tyke crawl, and then stand, wobbly-legged like a fawn, then stumble and walk.  They saw him point and burble and beg and cry.  He acted as precocious as a teenage novelist.  He communicated with his stumpy little hands like sign language, and his father swallowed hard one afternoon, when, after a vigorous walk around the block, the boy spoke:

“Johnny,” said Robert Johnson.

Pollywog

Pollywog

Paula could not find a lover because she looked like a toad.  Her thin mouth made an unhappy equator across her moon-shaped face.  Freckles dotted her wide nose and otherwise would have been cute, except they added to her unfortunate frogginess.  She wanted a lover very much.  She enjoyed kissing almost as much as she enjoyed drinking, and though she drank incessantly she had not been kissed in a very long time.  Paula looked like a very sad toad.

Today her lips pulled down in an awful grimace, and she cried pollywog tears onto her new yellow dress.  White lace ruffled at her arms and bosom.  A lavender sash wrapped around her waist in a large bow.  The lady at the garment store had tied it for her.  The garment lady lent her lavender shoes, too, and Paula stood crying on the street corner in them.  She resembled a sunflower wearing a violet, with a toad hiding between the petals.

Cars passed her and drivers stared, which made her weep in sobs and chokes.  She thought of their destinations as happy, everyday places like the market, the post office, or grandmother’s house.  She wanted to be one of them.  She imagined herself in the next empty seat she saw, riding along to anywhere instead of crying pollywog tears in the garment lady’s lavender shoes.

Yesterday and for years before, Paula wore blue jeans.  She didn’t like taking time to match shirts to skirts, choosing shoes and socks, only to do it all over again tomorrow.  She felt comfortable in jeans and sneakers, and any old shirt.  Blue jeans looked better as they got older, she thought.  They hung well on her hips.  Paula loved jeans.

Georgio did not.

Georgio worked in a record store for the discount.  He wore his hair long and smelled like cologne and gasoline.  He rode a nondescript motorcycle with only one seat.  He had a few tattoos and drank almost as much as Paula, and never, ever, wore blue jeans.

A counter stood between them at the bar where they met.  He complimented her hair, her freckles.  That she resembled a toad did not seem to occur to him.  She liked his cologne and told him so.  She liked the way he smelled of gasoline, too, but did not tell him.

They drank scotch together.  They drank dry scotch, complex scotch, smooth scotch, scotch neat, scotch on-the-rocks, with 7-Up and in rusty nails.  They sipped it, shot it, ordered it, watched it poured, and drank it.  They drank and drank, and many people began to worry about them until they saw that Paula and Georgio were inexhaustible, and decided to worry about themselves as the night dwindled, instead.

The scotch reddened their faces and their hands touched.  They held hands.  Paula was especially fond of holding hands.  She especially liked holding Georgio’s hands, because Georgio had very large hands that looked like lily pads beneath her own.  She laughed at Georgio’s jokes because he was funny, and looked into his eyes because they were pretty.  Paula liked Georgio.

She said she liked blues records, and Georgio said anyone who knows anything likes blues records.  Georgio said he liked ponytails with ribbons in them.  Paula thought it very convenient because she had a ribbon around her ponytail, and told him so.  Paula said she never went to church.  Georgio said that was fine; once, he burned one down.  Georgio said he loved green eyes.  Paula had green eyes.  She raised an eyebrow at him and smiled.

Georgio said pink was in fashion.  Paula said it was too much.  Georgio said he thought so, too.  Paula said luxury cars were excessive.  Georgio didn’t like them, either.  Georgio scoffed at politics.  Paula sniffed.  Paula told Georgio about the corrosive properties of cola, and he stopped drinking it.  Georgio said cell phones disgusted him.  Paula, too.  Paula had one anyway.  Georgio, too.  They called each other and talked on their phones, laughed, spilled their scotch.  They smiled and looked at each other.  They were the happiest couple in the bar.  Paula croaked a delicate hiccup, and Georgio’s eyes flashed adoring blue.  Then Georgio said:

“I hate girls who wear blue jeans all the time.”

Paula’s chest closed up and she sobered in a dizzying rush of confusion that left her disoriented.  He had said he hated her.  Her body stung with regret and self-revulsion.  Georgio didn’t hate her!  The denim burned against her legs, and her eyes welled.

“Me, too,” said Paula.  “I hate blue jeans.”

Georgio’s hand softly caressed her chin.  It seemed weighted to her chest.  She pulled the long line of her mouth up at the corners and fooled him into thinking she felt happy.  He raised his glass to hers and they celebrated youth, and young love.  Paula’s stomach rolled guilt deep in her guts.  He gazed on her and her eyes fluttered.  Beneath the counter separating them her blue jeans huddled away from Georgio.

The whiskey went and closing time came.  Georgio stood, arranging his pleather pants and grease-stained shirt, waiting for Paula to come.  She hid her jeans beneath the counter and swallowed the lump in her throat.  Perspiration like moss clung cold to her arms.  Her smile waned as it grew wider.

She had to use the ladies’ room, she said.  She’d meet him outside.

Georgio’s swagger looked and sounded like man as he left her.  She watched him.  Then she felt him waiting outside, imagined him taking her hand and leading her away from there.  She detested her favorite blue jeans.  An absurd desire to strip them off and go to him naked paddled among the reeds and pussy willows of her mind.  Her agony frustrated her until the moon of her face beamed rosy and hot.  She glowed from whiskey and Georgio, too.

Paula intended to leave through the back exit and create an excuse later, but what on earth would she say?  If he did not hate her for wearing blue jeans, he would hate her for deserting him after a flawless night of scotch and shameless flirtation, for sure.

She felt him waiting.  It hurt.

Fear attacked desire.  The indecision annoyed her still more.  Paula’s passions refused her anxieties any compromise, and her womanly will rebelled within her.  She stood.  All the other patrons had gone.

“Bar’s closed,” said the bartender.

Paula’s long, slow strides toward the door struck him stiff.  He stopped wiping glasses to stare.  Her thin red lips pursed in defiance and her eyes shone like sparkling emeralds.  Dainty little freckles dotted her nose and cheekbones.  Her jeans hung on her hips like the foil wrapper on a wine bottle.  How had he failed to notice her before?

She went past the door and doorman, down the stairs.  She stopped on the landing to remove her sneakers.  She pushed down, stepped out of the blue jeans.  She pulled away her shirt.  With only her purse and underwear she went downstairs and out into the faltering light of streetlamps.

Georgio’s heart stopped.  The drunken crowd outside sang and shouted.  Had she not been looking right through him he would not have known her, blinded by skin and lace.  She had an aura from the night mist glistening on her white neck and shoulders.  He raised his open arms.  She stood there.  Then she went to him.  She felt his calloused hands on her and thrilled.  They kissed.  Paula exploded inside.  The street cheered.  The last details Paula remembered were the cold, brisk air on her body and the scent of cologne and gasoline.

She woke up in his bed alone with the morning sun on her face.  A foggy memory of his last kiss lingered.

“Goodbye — good morning,” he had said.

His apartment displayed very little.  A dresser, a bed, a round table with two plain chairs and an ashtray with two smoked cigarettes in it.  A tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom.  On the wall hung a portrait of Sandra Bernhard on Broadway.  She sang in a negligee with her eyes closed and looked arguably irresistible.

Paula wanted breakfast.  Barefoot on the kitchen tile, she found the refrigerator empty except for beer and a canister of imported Greek olives.  She twisted it open and popped one in her mouth.  With the joyful contentment of a poet she rolled it on her tongue, feeling its roundness against the inside of her lips.  She sucked the oil from it and nibbled.  With her front teeth she pared the flesh from the pit and chewed it, swallowing only when every vestige of firmness had been savored away.  She walked naked to the garbage can and spat the seed into it with a smirk, turning on her heel.

The sun through the open drapes gladdened her.  People walked by and saw her naked body.  Realizing her clothes were still on the stairs at the bar, she laughed and laughed until she fell breathless onto the bed.

In the dresser she found a pair of grey wool slacks that fit her if she left the button undone and rolled the waist down.  In the closet she found an assortment of grease-stained nylon shirts.  She dressed, and to her indulgent delight discovered that the smell of cologne, gasoline, and man were on her like images on a photograph.

Barefoot and dressed in his clothes, Paula walked downtown.  She passed an elderly couple holding hands and whistled a song, poorly.  She kicked a pebble off the sidewalk with her toes.  She sniffed the morning breeze and tasted the salt from the ocean.  She clutched the collar of his shirt to her nose and smelled the Georgio mixed with Paula there.  The morning seemed to last all day.

She had breakfast at the café, and afterward coffee ‘till noon.  Then she had lunch, more coffee, and even borrowed a cigarette.  It was her second cigarette.  It tasted good with coffee.

Later as the sun proved the afternoon, she called Georgio at work and without effort convinced him to take her out.  They’d go to the races, he told her.  They’d bet small amounts on horses they would not speculate on.  They’d have steak, and conversation, and most of all, scotch.

Paula felt unlike herself.  She felt more like herself than ever before.  She dove into her persona and discovered that, after all, she turned herself on.

She walked to the tailor’s.

A beautiful middle-aged lady embraced her there.  She told Paula that yellow would bring out her eyes and go with her hair.  She said there was a dress that, with some minor alterations, would grace her figure and accent her womanly curves.  She showed it, and Paula agreed.  She’d look really good.  The price to finish it the same day was exorbitant.  She paid.

When the dress was complete Paula needed shoes.  The garment lady lent her lavender ones and gave her a lavender sash.  She tied it for her in a pretty circle that clung to her middle in a dainty way, smiling at Paula’s shining face as the knot slipped tight and the ends fell into round, feminine loops.  In the mirror she admired herself.  She looked like a sunflower wearing violets.

Many people passed the garment lady’s storefront.  Some of them eyed her with good things behind her eyes.  Some had no eyes but for each other.  Others seemed to have no eyes.

Paula stood at the street corner wondering what she would do until later, when a handsome pair of lovers walked by and paid her no attention.  In the swamp of her welling disgust she watched them pass, and the sight of denim on a woman’s hips sickened her to death when the faint aroma of gasoline washed over her freckled nose a moment later.

Pollywog tears swam from her eyes.  Her stubby fingers wiped her cheeks and felt clusters of tiny warts there.  She clutched yellow fabric in her hands.  The impulse to tear it away came with the memory of last night’s liberty and lust, making stillborn her infant self-love and stabbing shame deep into her thudding breast.  Powerless against a flood of degradation she felt pressing from everywhere but within, she sank beneath the stagnant surface of her bog and withered.  She shrank and receded inside as sorrow replaced all she knew once more, and the thought of herself made her shudder in revulsion.  Her eyes narrowed and her teeth gnashed.  Her nails cut into her palms as she wept.

Paula hated her yellow dress.

She hated that her yellow dress made her feel beautiful.  Paula hated with the hate of a bride defiled.  She hated with an innocent, poisonous purity.  She hated with the hate of a prostitute placed on a pedestal to be adored.

Paula could not find a lover because she looked like a toad.

Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson

At thirteen, Robert had a routine breakfast.  He had optimum body weight, good posture, and some pimples.  He had some Journey albums, a Snoopy alarm clock, and new basketball sneakers.  Robert hated basketball.  Robert had a C average, a favorite book, and an only friend.  Robert’s English teacher called his life a crescendo of magnificent unpopularity.

“That’s a well-turned phrase,” Robert’s science teacher said.

“Thank you,” said his English teacher.

His science teacher repeated it to his history teacher.

“A crescendo?  Of magnificent unpopularity?” he said.  “How sad.”

He mentioned it to Burt Reynolds, the school psychologist.

Reynolds summoned Robert to his office, which meant Robert saw the principal, first, where the principal told him how to find the counselor.  Robert’s classmates had no idea that he went there, but the principal did, and it came up as dinner conversation with his wife.

“One of our students, a magnificently unpopular one, was called to the shrink’s office, today,” he said.

“Magnificently unpopular!” said his wife.  “My!”

“Yes,” he said.  “I can’t help but wonder what Reynolds tells these kids.

Dr. Reynolds placed a box in front of Robert.  Robert looked at it as though it were ticking.

“Robert,” said Burt Reynolds, “inside this box are four boxes.  Inside each of those boxes are eight boxes.  How many boxes are there?”

Robert stared at it, and back at the doctor.  He looked at the box again, then at Burt again.  He stared.

“Take your time.”

“The question’s wrong, I think.”

“No.”

“Yes.  You mean eight boxes, not four.  Four boxes would only fill up half of it.  They’d all shake around.”

Reynolds sighed through a smile.

“The question does not say the box is full, Robert.  There are four of them in this one, and eight in each of those.”

“But, that’s wrong,” said Robert.  “Why would you do that?  If you put those thirty-two small boxes on top of the four medium boxes, they’d fill the big box perfectly.”

Burt Reynolds shook his head.  Robert received a poor grade on his evaluation.  The doctor also called the office to recommend a phone call home.  He wanted to meet Robert’s parents.

They wore sunglasses to the meeting.  His mother cried.

Soon, Robert had twin prescriptions, an upper to balance his depression, and a downer to mitigate any anxiety arising as a side effect.  Robert’s only friend called them meds.  His parents called them vitamins.  Robert took them.

The meds numbed the back of his neck as he sat at his desk on the first day of school.  He felt his spinal chord become spaghetti.  His head lolled as he looked around.  Posters of movie stars holding their favorite books lined the walls above the blackboards.  A stuffed Beethoven doll sat on an old speaker installed over the door beside the American flag.  Beneath it, as Robert’s eyes dulled, a girl appeared in the doorway.  She looked to Robert like a light hid under clothing, shining in the doorway with pale flesh that peeked below bangs and above blouse and bra, and when the teacher spoke to her, she nodded.  Yes, her name was Brooke Williams.

Robert had only that first class with Brooke.  Their teacher, Ms. Finch, looked like a hamburger.  Short and squat, with a round face creased by too much smiling in her long, mysterious life, Finch could not have garnered more animosity from the sixth graders at Ethel Dwyer Jr. High.  Kids treated her like the nerdiest kid in class.  Robert liked her.

The nerdiest kid in class would have been Robert Johnson, except he had his mother’s good looks.  Unfortunately, though, he also had his father’s anxious temperament.  Handsome and tall, with ears like the handles of an urn, he spoke when spoken to and otherwise hid himself behind the cover of a book.  He loved to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and felt like the only kid in the world who had read it four times.  He sympathized with Captain Nemo.  He fantasized about making his own empire beneath the waves where beauty meant kindness and anger meant ugly.

Robert’s parents beat each other up.  They never did it in front of him, but neither his mother nor father ever went a month without a black eye.  For years their penchant for sunglasses seemed natural to him, until he learned from television that people wear them to disguise abuse.  They loved each other, though, he thought, and they treated him like a god, except when he talked back to them or had not done the dishes.

“Everybody else has a dishwasher,” he said.

“Yes,” said his father, “but we’ve got you.”

Robert Johnson did the dishes and went to his room.  He had a record collection there that his Aunt Sue had given him, but most of the albums he played were his own.  Kids at school had CDs, but those cost twenty dollars apiece.  He could get three used records for ten bucks, his weekly allowance.  Today he played one of his favorites, a blues record by a guy also named Robert Johnson.  Lots of his Aunt’s records had screamy singers on them, and he liked those, but he couldn’t sing to them.  He could sing the blues, though.  He listened and listened, and learned the words.

“Old John Henry,” he sang, “steel drivin’ man.  Steel drivin’ ma-n, John Henry.”

He sang as he typed on an old computer.  He wrote a story about a man who lost his daughter on the foggy moors of Victorian England.  Searching in vain, he stumbled upon a magical book that led him to different worlds to search for her.  Robert planned to reunite them at the end.

Robert wrote by candlelight.  He knew nothing of paragraphing, so it all came out in blocks of PGDN.  He’d written scores of pages that way, by candlelight and the light of the monitor, in the silent hours of night when his parents slept.  He would go to bed at one or two, and wake up at seven for school, every day.

School gave him a world of joy and hurt, joys open and evident, and hurts not so obvious to those around him.  School formed faces and emotions for him, and he injected people into his writing like a god, picking out traits and happenstances as he liked and imagining America reading about them, wondering if anyone would ever know that he’d stolen them for fiction, as copy after copy sold out at Barnes n’ Noble or some other chain book store.  He stole his friends, his enemies, and, most recently, he’d stolen Brooke Williams.  She was the lost daughter in his tale.

Each day he had math with Brooke, he thought to himself that she had no idea how famous he’d make her.

He knew she didn’t know.  He knew he’d make her famous.  He knew he had to pursue her for her sake, because she deserved him.

Kids passed notes in class, and teachers would read them aloud if found, teachers who wrote kids up, threw notes away, reprimanded, or otherwise.  It excited Robert to take part in it.  He wrote notes designed to draw a positive reaction if read aloud.  He made them poetic, incendiary, funny, and brilliant.  He begged to get caught but never was.  Brooke and Robert exchanged a few.  Her notes read like journals.

Im in 1^st period with you now.  Can you believe Finch?  This homework is so lame!  I got grounded for staying up too late on the phone.  My dad really needs to die.  I got new shoes yesterday there black and purple.  I love purple!  Purple purple purple purple purple.  That’s the bell hold on.  OK now Im in 2^nd period.

Sometimes they went three pages like that, little windows into Brooke Williams’s life.  She folded them into triangles, or clever arrows that needed dismantling, or angular hearts that looked like valentines.  Robert sweated when they looked like valentines.

One day, Robert decided to tell Brooke he thought her beautiful.  He wrote a poem during science class, folded it into an airplane, and waited for the bell to ring.  When it did, he went into the hall with everyone else and stood away from Brooke’s locker.

He waited for her to appear.  She had a trio of pretty girls with her when she did.  They talked in rapid sentences all at once, over and around each other.  Listening to them reminded Robert of an orchestra tuning their instruments.  They looked like sisters, all of them in black skirts and knee-highs, Mary Jane doll shoes and white, short-sleeve business shirts.  They could have conquered Africa.

Robert Johnson stepped toward them, poem plane in hand.  He inhaled.  He exhaled.  He flipped the poem airborne.  It sailed straight, dipped a wing, collided into her open locker door and fell.  They backed away from it.  Robert panicked.  He stamped between them and took it up, thrusting it into her locker.  Her locker had a wall of textbooks in it and the plane fell again.  He snatched at it, missed, picked it up again, and shoved it inside.

He tried to hurry away and jostled one of them.  The busy hall prevented his escape.  He blended into it with difficulty.  He sweated through his next class.

“What’s the matter with you?” said his mother.  “I hate the attitude you’re giving me.”

“I don’t have an attitude,” said Robert.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing!” said Robert Johnson.

He played his Aunt Sue’s rock records all weekend and bared his teeth through the guitar solos.  He did not sing along.

Brooke didn’t answer his notes on Monday.  She glanced at him as though he were a panhandler, looking his direction but never exactly at him.  When he sneezed, she did not bless him.  He told Mike, his only friend, all about it.

“Whaddya see in her, anyhow?” Mike said.  “I mean, she treats you like fuckin’ furniture.”

Robert winced at the cussing.

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Sounds like it.”

“She didn’t before.”

“She does now, though.  Right?”

Robert shrugged, looked at his sneakers.

“I guess so.  I mean, yah, kind of.  Gosh,” he said.  “she’s so hot, though.”

Mike sighed.

“We’re doomed to walk alone, man.  Doomed to walk alone.  Fuck it.  Let’s go rent a movie.”

Mike and Robert had a tradition.  They ran most places they wanted to go in as straight a line as possible, vaulting fences, using each other as ladders, crossing the rooftops of houses, leaping from heights and rolling like paratroopers, using their jackets to blunt barbed wire and the tops of chain link.  If they bled on the way home, they considered their cuts and scrapes medals for another successful mission.

They rented a science-fiction movie about an intergalactic siege and felt inspired.  Mike knew where Brooke lived, he said.  They should toilet paper her house.  He talked Robert into it.  Robert called his mom, and she said he could spend the night.  They filled a backpack with rolls of toilet paper and snuck out late, having devised several booby traps to set around Brooke’s house.

A huge, umbrella-shaped tree stood in her front yard.  They threw toilet paper over it until it looked like a bride.  They tossed roll after roll over the roof like grenades.  They gave the garage door a white curtain.  They hopped the fence and stuck a safety pin into the top of the front door’s frame, then opened a second and hung it on that one.  They threaded string through the wire circle of the first one and tied it to the doorknob.  They tied a balloon to the other end, filled with whipped cream.  They lined little glass stink bombs under the doormat, and traded the key there for Mike’s.  They looked identical.  They vaselined the doorknobs and and the dial on the padlock at the gate, and balanced a tower of eggs on the knob leading to the separate garage.  Then, hooting and whooping like Apaches, they leapt over the fence and ran home.

Having taken his meds, Robert watched the door for Brooke on Monday morning and waited to feel their effects.  Brooke walked in.  Her eyes looked a little red, and her hair was up, something he’d never seen before.  When he passed a note to her, she wrote back.  Her house had been toiled-papered.  The kids had played pranks on her family, too.  Her dad made her clean everything up, and she got locked out of her house the night before.

That’s so unfair!

I know!  I wish hed just die.

You don’t, really.

Not really hes just really lame sometimes and I wish he would.  I wish I could live with my mom in virginia but shes in virginia and I don’t want to live there.  Virginias so lame.

Robert wanted to ask her if she’d read his poem airplane but thought better of it.  His forehead creased at the thought of the conversation.

Then this face smoothed out, and he felt oil making a second skin over him.  He swiped his fingers across his cheekbones and imagined leaving streaks, but his skin felt dry as hardpan.  The tops of his ears tingled cold.  He looked up at Brooke again, the back of her head, the nape of her neck, and saw it glow with a pearl light that pulsed around her.

He pushed his eyes to the folded notebook paper and rested the tip of his ballpoint pen on a blue line.  His hand moved.  He expected to leave greasy smears as his wrist slid over the page.  Words came out.

Virginia’d be less lame with you there.  What would they do with you?  The trees would lay down.  Sidewalks would turn to marshmallow and golf courses would sprout wildflowers.  The sun would stay out ‘till you went home, and stars would wait through dawn to see you off to school.  But, yeah, he wrote, Virginia’s probably lame, now.

He folded the paper into an octagon and drew a big happy face on it, then slipped it to the kid in front of him.  The kid asked another kid to borrow a pen, and dropped the note into his book bag when he opened it.  That kid kicked the girl next to him, and she looked over.  He nodded at the floor.  She picked up the note and tickled Brooke’s neck with it.  Brooke took it from behind her ear and unfolded it in her lap.  When Ms. Finch started scratching at the blackboard, Brooke twisted in her seat and looked at Robert.  Robert locked eyes with her, smiled, and looked away.

The bell rang.

The rest of the day shined like gold to Robert.  He went to a coffeehouse with Mike in the afternoon, and wrote until two when he got home.  The next morning, having enjoyed the benefits of the previous day’s medication, he ate a double dose.  An hour later, he felt better.

He cruised through the main hall at school heedless of his footsteps.  He studied the antique chandeliers and gilded crown molding for the first time, looking out over the heads of his classmates like a runway model looks over a crowd.  People made way for him.  A boy with hair in his eyes bumped into him and excused himself.

“Sorry,” said Robert, smiling at and steadying the kid before moving on.

Robert started a new short story in pre-algebra that morning.  He wrote with fluidity and confidence and flow, and by the end of the day it looked like something excellent was happening.  He kept at it, and the confident feeling stayed.  It took him until the start of eighth grade to get the story where he wanted it.  When winter break came along, he tied the manuscript in a ribbon and gave it to Brooke for Christmas.  She took it with wide eyes, thanked him, and went off to join her black skirt and knee-highs troops.

Winter break distracted Robert from school life.  He took less of his medication to make it look like he wasn’t doubling up on it.  As a result, his demeanor changed.

“Why are you so mean?” said his mother.  “It’s Christmas.”

“I’m not,” said Robert.

“Well, what’s with the attitude?”

“I hate when you say that!”

“Well, what’s with-”

“I don’t have an attitude!”

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”

“Jes’ leave me alone.”

Christmas came and went.  Robert saw lots of drunk relatives, wrapped and unwrapped presents, and received lots of clothing he hoped his mom wouldn’t make him wear.  He had forgot all about his present to Brooke Williams by the time school started.

He had only just stepped onto campus when she raced up to him.  He shrank from her.

“Oh, my god!” she said.  “Oh, my god, Robert, your story – was so good!  So good.  I cried, I cried so hard at the end.”

Robert gawked at her.

“Um,” said Robert, “so you liked it?”

“Oh, my god, I loved it,” said Brooke.

“Oh.  Good!  Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Brooke.  “Thanks, Robert.  Thank you so much.  Thank you.”

Then, she left.

Robert became an author.  He started work on a sequel to the story he’d given Brooke right away.  He stopped reading during math and science, and started writing.  He finished the novella before summer.  It had seventy-seven pages.  He thought the number lucky.  When he edited it, he re-arranged the words and changed the punctuation in such a way as to not lower the page count.  He wanted her to know how much work he’d done for her.  He also liked the number seventy-seven.

That’s how he spent eighth grade.  He wrote and read, read and wrote, and learned how best to take his vitamins.  Rather than popping them every day, he took them as he liked, tightening and loosening his nervous system according to his whimsy.  On bright days when he felt energetic, Robert chopped up his downers with a butter knife and sniffed them up his nose.  On gloomy, overcast days, he snorted uppers and took walks.  When he wrote upbeat material, he took uppers, and took downers for writing more dramatic portions.  Robert felt fine.  Mike worried about him.

“Dude, you should take it easy on that stuff, man,” he said.

“I can’t.  My psychologist says I’s gotta take them.”

“Dude, I don’t think he meant for you to take them like that.”

“What’s the difference?” said Robert.  “As long as I’m taking them.”

It rained one day, and Robert snorted uppers.  He stood near the enormous doors leading into the auditorium that housed the students at lunch when it rained.  One kid had brought a palm leaf from outside and stood on the steps above Robert, batting Robert on the head.  The other kids paid no attention.  Robert waited and let him do it.  The kid said things Robert didn’t listen to.  He wondered when the doors would open so they could go in.  They stayed shut.  The palm leaf had thorns along its branch like saw teeth, and the kid started poking his scalp with them, lifting his hair, and bopping him on the head.  It continued.

Robert had the longest arms and legs in school.  When he turned and seized the boy’s neck, pinning his head to the wall behind him, Robert barely had to move.  The palm leaf fell, and the kid spasmed, kicking his legs and clutching spasmodically at his throat.  Everyone turned around.  Robert’s voice sounded like rocks grating.  He spat in the kid’s face, close enough to kiss him:

“I – am not – amused.”

Robert threw him to the floor and curled his lip.  The kid, rigid, made a show of agitation but stood there shaking.  Robert looked at the other kids, back to him, and turned around.

It never came up.  He wondered if anyone would remember it long.  Brooke heard.

“I heard you beat up Clem,” she said to him.  “Did you beat up Clem?”

“I didn’t beat him up.  He was being a jerk.”

“I heard you did.  Didn’t you choke him and throw him down?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Well, he’s my friend, okay?  So don’t do that anymore, okay?  I’m mad at you.  I can’t believe you did that!”

Robert watched her stalk away.  Mike heard, too.

“Dude!  I heard you kicked the shit out of Clem Hutchinson.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“You know that’s Brooke’s friend, right?  Fuckin’ shit, dude!  That’s so rad.  You’re crazy, though.  She’s never gonna talk to you again.”

“I talked to her today.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said to stay away from him.”

“You gonna beat him again?”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“Well, I bet you anything he gets his friends and wants to fight you.”

Robert’s shoulders drooped.

“You really think?”

Mike raised his eyebrows, smiled, and nodded.

“He’ll take you to the park.”

“I won’t go,” said Robert.

“You have to go, man.  Or he’ll fuck with you all the time.”

Robert sighed, examining the ground.

“What do I do?”

Word spread through school faster than Robert could hear it firsthand.  He was fighting Clem Hutchinson at Lake Park after school.  Clem never said a word to him.  Everyone knew.  Robert ditched school.  He walked home, took out his downers, and cut up eight of them.  He snorted them in a pile with a swizzle stick taken from his parents’s coffee set.  He swaggered back to sixth period English.

The ceiling drooped in class and the walls bent inward.  He saw the windows bulge convex and the teacher’s desk sag.  His shoes felt like anvils.  He hid behind 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea like an ostrich, but the words seemed pointless to him.  When the bell rang, it rang dull and matter-of-factly.

The bell is ringing.

Robert shuffled into the hall.

Robert’s schoolmates herded him out the south door and through the parking lot, across the street and into the park.  The crowd left an open circle on the grass, like nobody wanted to be in the middle.  Cars crawled by.  Adults walked onto their lawns and stood hands-on-hips, watching.  An old man talked on a brick-like cordless phone.

His peers pushed him through the crowd.  He couldn’t feel their bodies.  In the middle of the circle, he swayed on his feet and tried to feel his pocket change.  People shouted and hollered.  They sounded mushy.

Clem stood with his friends.  They laughed and clapped him on the back as he stepped around.  Robert made eye contact with him, and Clem shouted something.  Robert smirked.  He wondered if Brooke was watching.

Clem ran across the circle.  He smashed his elbow into Robert’s cheek.  Robert spun to the ground.  Robert felt grass in his hands, spongy, wet, and crisp.  He squeezed it.  Clem kicked him in the stomach, kicked him again and again.  Robert tore up fistfuls of grass and got up. Clem hammered at Robert’s stomach.  Robert doubled over, and Clem kneed him in the forehead.  Robert stood upright, and sprinkled grass on Clem’s head like snow.  Clew, bewildered, turned around and said things.  Robert draped his apelike arms around his back and hugged him.  Clem threw him off.

“Whoa,” said Robert.  He staggered.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” said Clem.  Uprooted grass hung from his hair.

Robert laughed.  Clem stomped on his chest.  Robert laughed harder.  Clem jumped on him with both feet.  He slipped on Robert’s tee shirt and fell, hard.  Robert laughed harder.  Clem rolled over and started beating him.  Robert, laughing, took some hits and grabbed Clem’s fists in his hands, guffawing like a maniac.  His smile gaped like he was on a roller coaster.  He did not let go.  His face bled.  Clem thrashed and kicked.  The more he flailed around, the harder Robert laughed, and the harder Robert laughed, the more Clem threw his arms.  Robert let him go and held himself, laughing.  Clem stood back.

“What the fuck is the matter with him?” he said.

Robert saw Mike sail over him.  He crashed into Clem like a meteor.  Clem’s blood spattered them both.  They went down.  Robert laughed until his breath ran out, laughing in stuttering little coughs and sputters as mike battered Clem, arms flying like a windmill.  Robert felt himself carried.  He woke up on Mike’s couch.  He smelled sausage frying.

“Am I spending the night?” he said.

“Dude, where the fuck have you been?” said Mike, shaking spices into the frying pan.

Robert sat up.

“Does she hate me?” he said.

“You didn’t do anything – except act like a total nut.  She’ll hear that.”  Mike stirred the sausage.  “She might hate you.”

Robert breathed through his teeth.

“My face.”

“Mike scoffed.

“You should see Clem,” he said.  “His dad’s gonna sue me.”

“Why would he sue you?”

Mike laughed and held up his hand.  It resembled a Thanksgiving turkey.  Robert laid back down.

“I love you, man,” said Robert Johnson.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Mike.

Robert stopped passing notes in class.  He also stopped his medication.  He flushed it so his parents wouldn’t know.  He got lazy and dressed in the same jeans and tee every day.  His mom responded by buying more of them.  When wallet chains came in fashion, he bought one.

Sadie Hawkins came around, and he waited for Brooke to ask him to be her date.  When Nicole from Social Studies asked him, instead, he said he was going with Brooke.  Brooke never asked him.  He didn’t go.  When the spring dance came, he petitioned Brooke.  She said she wasn’t going.

It happened like that.  Soon afterward, they graduated.  At their ceremony, he gave his novella to her.  Seventy-seven pages.  She held its weight in her hands, unstapled and handwritten, and stared at him like they’d never met.

“You-”

“You liked the last one so much, I wrote you another one.”

Her graduation dress blew in the ocean breeze.  Robert straightened his tie, the way men did it in the old movies he liked to watch.  She looked at him.  She looked at the manuscript.  Robert’s handwriting looped and crossed and dotted without a single word crossed out or corrected.

“Thank you,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Robert’s toes stung.  His fingers flexed and relaxed.  His stomach knotted.  A lump in his throat choked him like he would cry.  His back tightened.

He smiled as debonair as possible, but looked down at her with every honest thought he had.  His eyes peered into hers, and she thanked him again.  Then, Brooke walked away.

Robert started learning guitar that summer.  He tried writing, but with Brooke gone until high school started, it felt empty and pointless.  The guitar came easier; he always had something to sing, but his fingers hurt from practicing all the time.  Notes came differently than words.

Notes never left him.  He played a chord, knew which note he wanted to hear next, found it, and played that one.  He could play three clumsy blues songs by August.  He wrote lyrics and memorized everything.  Robert became a musician.

“Did you know he could do that?” said his mother.

“He couldn’t do that a few months ago,” his father said.

“He’s a genius.”

“I’ve never heard of a kid his age playing the blues before.”

“How do you think he does it?”

“It’s a little scary.”

“Do you think he’s a natural?”

“I think it’s unnatural.”

She glared at him.

“He’s our son.”

“I just don’t understand it, is all.”

Robert played the blues all summer.  He played through side A, and when it finished, he refrained the last song for sometimes half an hour, singing through the middle.  If he erred, he laughed and played on.  He laughed more than his parents had heard him laugh since grade school, but made mistakes ever less frequently.

“He laughs like an old man,” said his mother.

“He sings like one, too,” said his dad.

“You notice him talking different?”

“It’s those old records you gave him.”

“I never listened to the blues; he bought those on his own.”

“Unnatural,” said his father.

The first day of school came, and Robert snorted a couple of downers in preparation.  Mike had gone to a different school, so he had no friends to meet there.  He ran into Brooke, though.  She went up to him.

“It was very good,” she said.

“What?” said Robert Johnson.  “Oh, sure.  Sure.  The story.”

“I’m going to type it for you,” she said.

Robert’s eyes widened.  He smiled.

“That’d be all right,” he said.  “That’d be really cool of you.”

“It’s going to take some time,” said Brooke.

“Sure enough,” Robert said, “I expect it will.  Thank you.”

She never did it.

Robert made acquaintances and a few friends.  He dressed in his jeans and tee every day.  His mother gave him money for a haircut and he spent it on records.  He slicked back his hair and shaved his neck, and his mom never mentioned it.  He skipped his meals and saved his lunch money, and since he never ate dinner, lost weight.  He had to cuff his jeans.

He started walking to school with his guitar so he could play during lunch.  It took a week for someone to find him where he sat playing, and another week for others to come.  Soon, Robert Johnson never stopped waving in the halls.

“You seem like a totally different guy when you play music, do you know that?” said a girl one day.

“Really?”

“Totally,” she said.  “Your eyes get small.  And you stick out your lip.  You sound older, too.”

Robert laughed.

“Maybe I am older,” he said.

Brooke heard about him and went to hear him play.  She stood behind a group of people tapping their feet and nodding their heads.  When the bell rang, she tried to get to him, but a circle of kids walked away with him.  He saw her and smiled, waved.

“You like Brooke?” said someone.

“Sure, I do,” he said.  “Mayhap a little.”

“She’s got a boyfriend.”

“She does?  Who?”

“Clem Hutchinson.”

Robert stopped.  He looked for Brooke, but she had gone to class.  He spun on his heel and walked home, saying nothing.

Brooke found him the next day.

“I didn’t know you could play guitar,” she said.

Robert scoffed.

“I didn’t know you dated assholes.”

She eyed him up and down, and stomped away.  Her sneakers slapped the concrete.

Robert started snorting his downers every day.  He told Mike they helped his guitar.

“That ain’t good, man.  You should quit.”

“Doctuh Burt Reynolds’ orders,” said Robert.

One day, he stopped playing behind the gym where he’d been hiding, and sat on the concrete stage of the amphitheatre.  Students ringed the tiers before him, eating from cafeteria packages and brown bags.  He checked the tune of his guitar, and bowed his back.  His head dipped.  He stuck out his lower lip and closed his eyes.  The first chord came out louder than he thought the guitar could sound.  Kids looked up.

High school disappeared.  Music came through him, and he heard people clapping.  Someone sat beside him.  He felt kids standing around.  He heard people singing.  He heard himself talk between songs.  The amphitheatre listened.

“She weren’t no good, nohow.  Foolish, foolish woman, don’t never know a man love her right.  No, suh.  No, suh.  An’ I let ‘er go, mm-hmm.  And den,” he said, and opened another song.  Robert heard applause and smile.

The principal called him to the office two days later.

“Some students are very upset at you,” he said.  “They say you’re prejudiced.”

“They sure is,” said Robert Johnson, “in’t dey?”

“Why do you talk like that?” said the principal.

Robert smiled like a jack o’ lantern.

“Why you talk like you do?” he said, squinting.  “I play, tha’s all.”

The principal sighed.

“You’re making some students very upset,” he said.  “They’re very offended.”

“That ‘fends me,” he said, “but I only come to you cause I’m called.”

The principal drummed his fingers.

“Look,” he said, “if this continues, there’ll be trouble.  I can’t let you play in the amphitheatre.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Robert Johnson, licking his lips.  “All right.  That make you feel better?”

The principal frowned.

“This can get much worse, Mr. Johnson,” he said.  “Let’s not let it.”

“If I could stop it,” said Robert, “you’d never hear no blues outta me ever ‘gain.”

Robert played behind the gym after that.  More kids showed up than the space allowed for.  They had to stand.  Some ate, but most held their sack lunches in their hands.  He finished a song, and as the kids applauded, a small group of students booed him.  He looked up, heavy-headed and bow-backed.

“Naw, c’mon.  Le’s not start a waw, heyah.  Der’s music n’ der’s fight’n, an’ dere ain’t no fightin’ I evah liked much’s music, so le’s all jes’ have a good tahm n’ keep the warrin’ for de football fiel’, hoh?  Yeah?  Well, awlright.”

He played.  His guitar rang.  People swayed and clapped and tapped their feet.  Some danced in place.  Somebody said things up front, and others booed him.  He didn’t listen.  Other students told them to shut up.  People shoved other people.  When he finished the song, his applause divided.  Kids argued.  He tried to quell it.

“C’mon, it’s jes’ music.  Ain’t nothin’ fo’ nobody to fight over.”

Somebody walked up to him.

“You’re a racist bastard,” said Clem.

Robert played a chord.

“That right?” he said.

Clem grabbed the neck of his guitar.

“And you need to quit playing here,” Clem said.

“Ain’t gone quit nothin’,” said Robert, “an’ I ain’t gone fight choo, neither.  Why don’t choo go stan’ over der’n listen a bit, swear t’wont hurtcha none.  Might even like it.”

Clem pulled on the guitar.  Robert looked up, saw Brooke.  She squinted at him, shaking her head.

“Nah leave off,” said Robert.  “I’m gone play some, cause’n deres more here wanna hear, than wan me go ‘way, an’ I can’t see no sense in quittin’ less’n deres sense in quittin’.”

“Stop talking like that!”

Robert Johnson shut his eyes and nodded.  He hung his head a long time.  People said things.

“Leave him alone, Clem.”

“Let him play!”

“Let him play!”

“Go away!”

Clem stepped back.  Brooke came from the side and took his hand, pulled him back.

“He’s fuckin’ prayin’ or some shit,” said Clem.

Brooke faced him.

“I am,” she said.

Clem scoffed.  Robert looked up.

“No prayin’,” he said, wiping his nose.  “I’m writin’ a song.”

He began to play.  Clem moved.  Brooke caught him.  The guitar hummed out, loud and demanding.

“Pea-rl,” Robert crooned, “weren’t never mi-ne.  Never mi-ne, my Pearl.  Who is’t done cast yo-u, befo’ dem swi-ne, my Pearl.”

Clem stepped forward.  The crowd closed infront of him.  Brooke let him go.  She stared.

“Pea-rl, swee-ter den wine.  Sweeter den wi-ne, sweet Pearl.  Why is’t cain’t have yo-u, why inchu mi-ne, my Pearl.”

Clem had hands on him, holding him steady.  His face looked ready to pop.  Brooke’s lips parted.  The edges of her teeth showed.  Her eyes, large and blinking, seemed unable to look anywhere else.  The bell rang.  No one left but Clem.

“Pea-a-rl!  My Pearl.  You been unki-nd.  You been unki-nd, my Pearl.  Ever’body knows ah love you, an’ dey knows it ain’t no lie, my Pearl.”

The kids cheered, yelled and whistled.  The noise continued.  Class had started a while before, and the ruckus brought the security guards in their golf carts.  The crowd scattered.  Brooke stopped staring only when she reached the corner.

“What do you think you’re doing?” they said, taking Robert.

The principal’s neck rippled with tendons and veins when they ushered Robert in.

“You held students after lunch?” the principal said.  “You’re suspended!  I’ve called your parents.  Your father’s on his way.  If I ever see that guitar again, I’ll expel you.  Do you understand?  Do you hear me?”

“Yessuh,” said Robert Johnson, “yessuh, I do.  Won’t happen ‘gain, not on yo’ life.”

“And stop talking like that.  Get out of here.  Wait in the lobby.”

Robert’s guitar hit the doorframe with a loud knock as he left.

Robert’s father wanted to take his guitar away, but his mother prevented him.  They scheduled several appointments with Dr. Burt Reynolds.  Reynolds changed Robert’s medication.  Robert would take two of these twice daily, one of those, and another one every other day.  Dr. Reynolds knew what they were.

The pills made him nauseous the first week.  When the nausea stopped, Robert changed.  He spoke less, and more like his peers.  He seemed to have forgotten all his slang.  ‘Mom’ became ‘Mother’, and ‘Dad’ became ‘Father’.  His responses never strayed far from ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  He played guitar, still, but the blues went stale to him.  He played rock n’ roll, instead, but with a halting, changing rhythm.  He only sang the plainest melodies.  He started writing again.

Clem tried to organize a fight again, but students laughed at him.  Did he think he was in jr. high?  Clem’s reputation suffered.

Brooke brought a typed manuscript to Robert at lunch one day.  He stood alone in the amphitheatre, writing on a notepad that lay on the concrete stage.  She startled him.

“You’re not eating?”

“No.”

“Here,” she said.  It had a ribbon around it similar to the one he’d tied around the story he gave her for Christmas in seventh grade.

“I corrected some spelling,” she said.  “I hope it’s okay.”

Robert smiled.