“My dad says you got to be careful with black girls, though.” He tears a piece of cherry Fruit Roll-Up from wax paper.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Because they’re a pain in the ass. He told me everything changed when the busing started.”
“The busing?”
“Yeah, haven’t you asked yourself why this school is like 80 percent black even though Westchester is 90 percent white?”
I never thought about it because everyone was white in Oregon and I just figured L.A. was the opposite. Anyway he sounds angry about it which doesn’t make sense because that’s the whole thing that makes this school good. All the mama jokes and dance moves. The new music: Guy and LeVert and Troop and Salt-N-Pepa. Plus the kids here can really break-dance. We had a break-dancing crew in Oregon but nobody was very good at it. Anyway, Tanisha is nicer to me than anyone else.
“You know what they say,” he says.
“No. I don’t.”
“About black people.”
“What?” I have no idea what this has to do with Tanisha Campbell who is the only beautiful thing about this school.
“Black people are lazy.”
“No they’re not. That’s stupid.”
He explains it like it’s my mistake, like it’s something I need to know, like I am silly or naive for never having learned it. “Seriously, you don’t know this shit?”
I shake my head. It doesn’t feel true. “That doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah, and they eat chicken and watermelon.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I’d take chicken and watermelon over rabbit stew any day.
“It’s just that they’re usually kind of dirty and poor. You know, on food stamps with single moms and a dad in prison or on drugs.”
I remember that none of these kids know we were on food stamps in Oregon and my dad was in prison and before that he was on heroin. Anyway, Dad makes fun of white guys in suits too. He’ll hitch his pants up high on his waist and pretend to push invisible glasses up his nose as he shakes a disapproving finger. I wonder what Chris Faraday would say if I told him those things. Would he look at black people differently, or me?
“I’m just joking.” He claps me on the back. “That’s just what people say. It’s kinda true, though. Hahahaha.” Maybe he doesn’t know about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, about the tear gas in People’s Park, the Black Panthers in Oakland or trying to stop Thatasshole Reagan.
“It’s not just blacks, though. Mexicans steal shit. You gotta watch out. And Orientals can’t drive.”
“I think you’re making all this up,” I say. It sounds so foreign and stupid. “Why would they steal things?”
“Because they’re poor.” There it is again. Poor. I think about the Monopoly money and the hand-me-downs, the big blocks of government cheese we melted into noodles, the trips to Goodwill for the bubble gum shoes. I picture their big houses, their moms with bobbed haircuts and cheery makeup, their dads sitting quietly, one leg crossed over the other, reading a newspaper. I don’t know these people.
“What’s our thing?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean white people. What’s our bad thing?”
“Oh. We’re just normal.”
CHAPTER 25
GOTH
A few months after I start school, Mom calls and says Tony is becoming a goth. The football team didn’t “work out” for him so he found a new crowd and started wearing eyeliner and lacy gloves, bolo ties and weird pointy shoes with thick rubber soles. She’s pretty sure they’re all on drugs. It doesn’t surprise her, she says. “He’s always struggled with the early signs of an addictive personality.” But he’s looking weirder these days in the pictures she sent, with his hair blown out in all directions like he stuck his finger in a socket.
He had a party and destroyed the house. She left him in charge for the weekend and he invited “every burnout in the city of Salem.” When she got home from her conference, the house was filled with trash, cigarette butts, empty beer cans on the floor. The fireplace banister was broken. There was a hole in the living room wall leading to the bathroom that someone made with the orange maul from the toolshed. The floor of the wolf den was covered in puke. The floor in Tony’s room looked as if snow had fallen because the rug was dusted in a thick layer of white powder. At first Mom thought it was drugs but it turned out to be laundry detergent.
Doug had left again, so she came home alone. “Imagine, going somewhere to seek clarity and coming home to that,” she says.
When she walked in, Tony was standing in the kitchen washing a dish. He looked up and calmly said, “So … how was your weekend?”
She says she can’t take it anymore and he has to move back to L.A. He’s out of control and he needs his father.
“I knew I was in deep shit so I was like fuck it, you know? We were in trouble anyway,” he tells me, smoking a cigarette behind the Bowl a few days after he gets to Los Angeles. The Bowl is our constant destination, the place we go to hang out and smoke and be good at being bad. He says he didn’t even know what happened at that party. He was passed out in his room the whole time.
“I guess shit got out of hand. When I woke up and saw what happened, all I could think was, ‘Damn that was one sick party.’” He has black eyeliner on and a pair of tapered Dickies. He’s wearing leopard-print Creepers, which are shoes that look like big elevated triangles, and a white shirt with a big collar buttoned all the way up to his chin. His hair is sprayed in different directions in big swooping arcs like ocean waves crashing together on his head. His fingernails are painted black. “We had to drive some heads home and we thought we had time to clean the house or make up a story about how it was robbed, but out of nowhere we saw Mom in her Honda on D Street. We boned out, like we drove fifty miles an hour down the alley to beat her home but there was no time to do anything. It was just too fucked-up, bro. The worst part is all my friends hate me now because she called their parents.
“Still, it was fuckin’ legendary.” He takes a drag from a long white menthol. “People were tripping acid in the barn, breaking down the walls. There was a punch made from vodka and peach schnapps, the music was loud and everyone was just dancing. Nobody gave a fuck. It was the greatest thing.”
I don’t know this person. The last time I saw Tony he wanted to play football and learn to pitch an overhand curve. Who are these friends he’s talking about? What is this hair? I tell him I don’t even understand why he wanted to go back there in the first place.
“Oh man, she had no idea what I was doing. I spent the whole summer drinking. I snuck out every night. I cut the screen off the window to use in my one-hitter pipe. I smoked cigarettes in the fucking house, while she was home. She came in once and I had just spilled a full ashtray on the floor and she didn’t even notice. It was like living alone.”
It’s ironic. After all those meetings about the negative consequences of drug use, all those books and pamphlets, all those AA sayings hanging from the walls, “Let go and let God,” “One day at a time,” all the campouts and Big Talks and Child Psychology books about “roles children take on in addictive families,” and despite it all, the house on Breys Avenue was destroyed by a drug party.