“You play hearts?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a card game. You bid on tricks and the one who bids right at the end and gets the most tricks with hearts in them wins.”
“No. Never heard of it.”
“How about cribbage?”
“No.”
“Gin rummy?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“I don’t know. Ride my bike and watch TV. Sometimes we smoke cigarettes behind the school.” After the fights, as a kind of peace offering, Tony and I started smoking together. Now that he’s in Los Angeles, I don’t have anyone to smoke with.
“Oh. Well, you could smoke behind the fence in the alley. Nobody goes back there. But we don’t have TV. We should go to your house next time.”
“Hmm.”
Jake puts a record on. It’s got strange guitars that sound like they’re underwater. He shows me the record cover. Three Imaginary Boys by the Cure. “Robert Smith is a fucking god,” he says.
“Who?”
“The lead singer of the Cure. This guy.” He points at a poster. It’s a silhouette of a man with big wild hair and a guitar slung around him. Next to him are the words “Boys Don’t Cry.”
We listen to the weird guitars fill up the room, Robert Smith’s strange warble floating over the band like some kind of wailing spirit. It’s weird. But good weird. I like it, but I don’t know why. Who are these imaginary boys?
We go into the kitchen to make noodles with canned tomato sauce, which we drown in butter, black pepper and the rubbery yellow government cheese that he must’ve gotten from the food bank. “This shit ain’t bad in noodles, but you can’t eat it straight.” Jake laughs as he stirs the wedges into the pot. It’s nice to have someone to joke with about government cheese.
We go back to his room. I tell him about Paul leaving and how we skin and eat rabbits for dinner and go to AA campouts and my brother who lives with my dad and Bonnie in L.A. He tells me he never knew his dad so I should feel lucky. All he knows is it was a man in Nebraska and how his mom was married to Craig and Craig has been in prison too. Sometimes Craig gets mad and threatens his mom but Jake gets in the middle so Craig screams at him. “He’s a scary fuckin’ dude when he’s mad.”
Craig is Alex and Ashley’s dad, Jake’s little brother and sister. Even though they have different fathers, he just wants to protect them and help them and you can tell he thinks it’s his job. He says he found a little packet of white powder in the dresser once so he thinks Craig is still on drugs or holding them or selling them. “I’m not sure which to be honest but hey, at least when he’s home, we got food in the house.”
Jake says people come by the house looking for Craig, sometimes in the middle of the night. He answers the door in his white tank top and creased khakis then reaches into his pockets to get a baggy which he’ll toss across the porch as he lights a cigarette. “Say what you will, the dude can sell and I’m not asking questions.”
He tells me the Cure is the best band in the world because Robert Smith plays all the guitars and writes all the songs and they’re not just about partying and whatever “bullshit Mötley Crüe or fuckin’ Ratt songs are about.” He says they’re about real life, about how things get fucked-up but that it’s okay to be fucked-up because at least you got other people who are fucked-up too. I nod and pretend to understand. We listen to three Cure records. I quietly decide to take down my Mötley Crüe poster as soon as possible.
He makes a tape of Cure songs for me on his stereo. I play it at night in bed on the Walkman Dad bought me. The songs are all so sad. He screams sometimes and he whispers sometimes and even the happy songs seem sad.
Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die.
It feels good to feel bad. There’s a relief like something I can’t name, like something I can’t talk about is finally being said. Mom tells us how happy we are and I know it’s my job to pretend. If I tell her I’m sad, she just shakes her head and corrects me, telling me all the reasons I’m luckier than other kids. So I go to a place in my head where I can be alone. Listening to Robert Smith sing his happy songs about how sad he is feels like he’s there too, like he has his Secret Place in his head where he goes and since he wrote a song about it, he’s right here in my headphones, so we’re in this Secret Place together. Me and Robert.
It’s a place where we are allowed to be sad, instead of feeling like freaks of nature, us weirdos and orphans.
I pull my eyes out, hold my breath and wait until I shake.
Jake and I push our desks together in class so we can crack jokes about other kids or the crush he has on Miss Cork, the young blond PE teacher with the puffy bangs who Jake swears he’s going to marry someday. We play football at lunch, and after school we go to his house to play cards and listen to records. Sometimes we shoot hoops and sometimes we get stuck watching Alex and Ashley while his mom goes shopping. She says she’ll be right back but then disappears for five or six hours at a time, leaving us to figure out what to feed a couple of two-year-olds for dinner. When we go to Plaid Pantry, he buys something at the counter to distract the old man while I steal cigarettes from the Winston display. He doesn’t smoke, but he seems to take a certain pride in the fact that I do, like it proves something about me, despite how small I am.
Everyone thinks he’s older. Sometimes they think he’s an adult so it’s like having a special power because nobody messes with you when you’re best friends with a giant and Jake is my first best friend and my best best friend in the world.
CHAPTER 21
THE GHOSTS THAT CROWD YOUR CASTLE IN THE SKY
Mom needs to start dating again. That’s what she tells me. She needs to meet a good man and she can’t be alone all the time. Paul still comes around to pick me up and take me places on weekends. Mom says, “It’s important we have a relationship. After all, he was your first father figure.” Paul doesn’t seem to see it this way. I think he just likes taking me to Chuck E. Cheese or the water tubes out in Keizer. I think Mom gives him money but I prefer the trips when we don’t spend any money, when we go fishing under the West Salem bridge or take long walks that turn into jogs and sprints in Minto-Brown Park. We decide I should be a runner since I love to run and that’s usually a good start. We both like to see how far we can go before we have to cut through the fields and head back to the car from exhaustion. He takes me somewhere every weekend. We never had the money to go to these places as a F-A-M-I-L-Y, so it feels like the two of us are trying to make up for something. He’s more distant now and he seems sad when he talks about the house on Breys Avenue. I can tell he misses us.
One Saturday, he doesn’t show up. We are supposed to go down to the 4-H fair to check out the cows and the crafts. He thought it would be good for me to learn more about nature. Instead, he calls the next day to apologize. He says he had some work to do and couldn’t make it, but Mom and I both know he’s probably drinking again. He comes just once more, taking me to the school to play baseball but forgets a glove and a bat so all we have is one ball and one glove. He stands at home plate and throws grounders to me which I try to field and toss back to him. He’s goofy about it, throwing the ball backward over his shoulder or throwing his glove in the air to knock it down when I throw it over his head.