My 360-degree view at Hertz Trucks provided an important supplement to my high school education. I had front-row seats to crazy stuff, like pairs of shady characters frantically shuffling through the parking lot, each holding the end of a broomstick, from which a row of stolen portable TV sets dangled by their handles. This was back when TVs were big heavy boxes with handles. These vagrants were always gone too quickly to call 911. I just kept the door locked.
An arguing couple once parked themselves just outside, and I could hear every word of their domestic squabble through their closed car and my glass box. “I’ll kill you, bitch!” Stuff like that. They could clearly see me and vice versa. I felt like a third wheel on a bad date. I saw ground-shitters, pants-wetters, and out-passers from the safety of my cube. There was one fellow who would have stumbled right into my desk but for the Plexiglas between us. His eyes rolling around spastically in his head, he pissed himself while pressed up to the glass and passed out practically at my feet, dozing there for a couple hours before hobbling away. I’m not sure why I needed to lock the door for that one.
At Hardee’s (a sort of Southern junior-league McDonald’s), I learned when not to call the police. While taking out the trash during my 6-P.M.-to-2-A.M. shift, I spotted a pair of legs poking lifelessly out of the mess in the dumpster. I, of course, called the cops. The whole affair ended with this man throwing up in the squad car. I thought the police were going to beat me with a stick for the inconvenience. The lesson seemed to be that if you see what you think is a corpse in the trash, never mind.
From then on, I would save 911 for real emergencies. For instance, when a family feud broke out in the dining area, sending the employees crouching behind the counter. Screaming hillbillies with baseball bats, a lot of shirts being ripped off, and shit breaking. The mother from one of the families was the meanest of the bunch and had the other mother on the floor, elbowing her face to a bloody pulp, ripping hair out, and squealing like an animal.
I should take a moment to explain that these Hardee’s and Hertz scenes did not have to be part of my upbringing. This was self-inflicted. This was volunteer tourism. My own doing. Had I not been famous at school for being the class clown, maybe I could have gotten work in my own neighborhood, like everyone else. But when managers of local businesses asked their student employees what this Ben Folds character was like, I got a thumbs-up for being HI-larious! I was known for stunts like crawling out a window in the middle of a class or faking a speech impediment in another. Not the kinds of talents most employers are looking for.
But to be fair, I was a different person at work. I was a fine employee, possibly even an overachiever. The lifers at places like Hardee’s recognize kids like me as well-to-do transient—here today, gone tomorrow to live the dream. And so, relative to these lifers, I was the fancy fortunate one. Perceived as eloquently spoken. A snowflake before snowflakes. Quite the contrast to how I was seen at youth-orchestra rehearsal, where I felt more like an underprivileged pine knot amongst the more refined.
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At school I was part-time overachiever and part-time loser. I took all the advanced-placement college-credit classes. But by twelfth grade I was flunking most classes for not showing up. I was a hard worker, a class clown, an accelerated student, the token poor kid, the token rich kid. A jackass of all trades.
I was making some pretty awful choices, as kids often do. My father, understanding that his advice was falling on deaf ears, said I would have to just learn the important life lessons on my own. And he could only hope that they would be “cheap lessons”—that is, he hoped I would suffer severe-enough consequences for my actions that I might learn something but not so severe that I would end up losing a limb. I found the God of Cheap Lessons both an angry and a merciful God. He dealt all I could stand and left my limbs intact.
As young men are wont to do, I begged for trouble, though I never wanted to cause anyone harm. I wasn’t roaming the streets looking for a fight (ha, can you imagine?), but unsupervised teenagers in adult’s clothing can get in over their heads quickly. And unsupervised teenage couples removing their adult clothing in the back seats of cars in dimly lit parking lots get in over their heads even faster.
And so my senior year was spent living a teenage nightmare with my first girlfriend. That nightmare—our abortion—became the subject of the song “Brick,” and much of what happened played out just as the song states. I sold some early Christmas gifts to pay for everything and I took my girlfriend to the clinic the day after Christmas. It’s all laid out quite literally in the verses. What wasn’t in the song were all the stressful un-singable details that plagued our lives while finishing high school. She and I both missed quite a bit of school that year, and nobody could figure out exactly why. But she had gotten pregnant early in the autumn and she was having an awful time of it all, pre- and post-abortion. I would try to help where I could. While I didn’t manage my own homework, I did as much of hers as I could. We had kept the whole thing secret because we didn’t think adults would understand or help. I would try and keep her from cutting her face with razor blades, which she did anyway a few horrible times. I was always worried that she might kill herself while I was at work. I was painfully aware that she was the one walking the hardest yards, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Over senior year I had recurring strep throat and mononucleosis and, along with the absences due to our situation, I ultimately didn’t meet the attendance requirement for graduation. I had missed as many days of school as I’d attended. One morning, a few weeks after the abortion, I met my girlfriend in a church parking lot to give her homework I’d done so she wouldn’t flunk too. It was pouring rain and she jumped into my car as I handed her a stack of notebooks. She lost it right there, screaming uncontrollably and shaking. I suddenly realized how very in over our heads we really were. We needed help. I was worried she was going to die, so I drove her to the hospital. A counselor took her in and alerted my mother, who happened to work next door. It was all a relief, even my parents finding out. A great weight was lifted. Once the secret was out, we were children again.
Our parents were more understanding than we could have imagined. They were mostly just concerned. I picked my girlfriend up from the hospital and she already seemed much better. She was talking, at least, and that was an improvement. I took her back to the church parking lot, where she got in her car to follow me to a Subway for lunch. As I stopped at a light, I looked in the rearview and saw she wasn’t stopping. Her car continued full speed ahead, plowing into the rear end of mine. Both cars were totaled, though neither of us was injured. They were huge old cars. Cheap lessons.
My mother loaned me her Honda Civic to get to school for the next week, since the insurance company would not loan a car to a teenager. It was the first and only new car my parents ever bought. When I came out of class, the car was gone. It had been stolen. I made the dreaded call to Mama from school and she picked me up. She was unbelievably understanding.