Everything Is Wrong with Me (20 page)

Prior to the date, Vic got ready by listening to Steely Dan. He shaved, which was a privilege and obvious sign of manliness among twelve-year-olds. When he was finished, he got dressed, sat in the leather recliner he and his brother had in their cramped room, and secretly smoked a cigarette out his window.

I did not shave before the date, because I did not have any hair to shave.
*
I did, however, obsessively brush my teeth, so concerned was I with kissing a girl while having bad breath. When I finished, I sat down on my bed and listened to John Lennon sing “Cry Baby Cry” to help me calm down. This was going to be a good night. I hoped.

Phil, much more accustomed to these types of things than either Vic or I, threw on a splash of cologne (likely Drakkar) when he stepped out of the shower. He put on his nice new Structure shirt, tousled his hair, checked himself in the mirror, and, as a final touch, put his gun in his pants. He was ready to go out.

A few weeks before, Phil had bought a gun. A fake gun, that is. We were too old for cap guns but not nearly old enough for the real thing, so this particular gun was somewhere in the middle. It was a replica gun, like an inoperative model of a gun. It shot neither caps nor bullets—it shot nothing, actually. He bought it because it looked alarmingly like a real gun. Phil had taken to carrying around his “piece,” as he called it, everywhere. I couldn’t blame him; it was a pretty fucking cool gun, a chrome .38 revolver, nice and new and shiny. But what was different about this gun from other fake guns was not only how real it looked, but how real it
felt
. Phil’s gun had some real weight to it, and unless you knew it was a fake, you would never guess it was.

As Phil, Vic, and I walked to the movie theater to the meet the girls, Phil lifted his shirt, showing us the gun in his waistband. Vic and I rolled our eyes, thinking this was Phil trying to be his usual “badass” self, and didn’t think anything else about it. There were more important things to worry about tonight.

At the movies we met Adriana, Phil’s interest, and, for me and Vic to divide and conquer, Christine and Faith. It was plain to see early on in the evening that neither Vic nor I would be sharing a glorious make-out session with either girl. Just as we had begged/forced Phil to bring us along, it seems that Adriana had begged/forced Christine and Faith to come along with her. Actually, I don’t think any of the four of them—Phil, Adriana, Christine, and Faith—spoke to either Vic or me all night. Adriana deferred to Phil, adoringly almost, as he aced the audition before Christine and Faith. Vic and I talked to each other, but rarely. At best we came off as strong silent types; at worst we looked like Phil’s bodyguards/semiretarded friends.

After the movie, during which Phil and Adriana made out with each other the entire time flanked by Vic and me on one side and Christine and Faith on the other, we stuck to the original plan and went to get pizza. The pizza place was only a block away, a store in a small strip mall that also contained a Wawa,
*
a check-cashing place, a video store, and an empty store. There was a large parking lot in front of these stores and opposite the stores on the other side of the parking lot were two busy gas stations. This area was just underneath an exit off Interstate 95, the main north-south artery on the east coast of the United States, and which runs right through Philadelphia.

Vic and I watched Phil and the girls carry on at the pizza place. We laughed when it seemed appropriate to laugh but mostly kept to ourselves. I was bummed out by the whole situation but had long before given up on the night. I had had high hopes heading into it, but the coldness of Christine and Faith brought them crashing to the ground. I did not consider myself the next Warren Beatty, but a little nonaccidental eye contact would have been nice. So as I still do when I face rejection from women, I shut down. Fuck it, I thought, if they don’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk them. They’re probably lesbians anyway. Yeah, lesbos. Eff them.

After we finished the pizza, the guys, chivalrous as we were, got up to pay for the slices and sodas. Vic and I, as we were sitting on the outside seats, got up first, but Phil told us to sit down. “Guys, I got it,” he said as he lifted up his shirt to show the girls his gun.

Seeing the girls squirm with fright, Phil quickly added, “Nah—I’m just kidding! It’s fake!” He pulled the gun out of his pants and plopped it on the table for them to see. Adriana and Christine were fascinated by the gun and how real it looked, asking various questions that Phil answered coolly and mysteriously (“Where did you get it?” “I got it from a buddy.” “How much was it?” “Don’t worry about it, but not cheap.”). Vic and I rolled our eyes and wished that we were more athletic, or at least good at tennis. Faith was very uncomfortable with the gun. Even though she was told it was a harmless fake, it looked too authentic for her tastes. The whole time the gun was on the table, which was only about a minute, she never took her eyes off it and never altered her cringing posture. Phil noticed this. After we had paid and we were out in the parking lot, Phil pulled out the gun and began jokingly threatening Faith with it, screaming “I want you, Faith!” and chasing her around the parking lot with the gun drawn as she squealed and ran away. The rest of us laughed, or pretended to. Phil stopped chasing Faith and the group reassembled for good-byes, as Christine’s mom would soon be arriving to drive the girls back to their neighborhood. Much to Phil’s and Adriana’s chagrin, Christine’s mom arrived early and there was no time for any good-night making out. Much to the rest of our delight, there was no need for an awkward good-bye.

Phil, Vic, and I began walking home along Water Street, next to the I-95 underpass, which we referred to as “under the bridge.” This stretch was sketchy; many of the older kids hung out under the bridge to drink and do drugs and hook up, as we would in a few years. A lot of homeless people and a number of unsavory characters hung around there as well. But we stuck to the Water Street side, which was lined with abandoned factories, giant castles of concrete now boarded up, standing five or six stories high, eyesores that were once responsible for jobs for our grandparents’ generation but now housed nothing but ghosts and dust. The black waters of the Delaware River trudged quietly along less than an eighth of a mile to our east; our homes and families were less than a quarter mile to our west.

We were not afraid, since this was a walk we each had done, later at night and without the benefit of friends, hundreds of times before. Besides, it was the quickest way to get home. We talked as we walked, an occasional car passing us, Phil swearing up and down that he had, in fact, had his hands up Adriana’s shirt as they made out. While both Vic and I doubted this claim and said as much, I was too embarrassed to offer that I knew for certain that this was not true, because I watched Phil and Adriana make out for most of the night, hoping to collect any visuals that might possibly be useful for a masturbatory session later. A few blocks ahead of us, we saw a police paddy wagon turn onto Water Street, speeding along with its lights off, heading in our direction down the one-way street. “They were perfect,” Phil said, “like this much,” opening his hand wide to show the size of Adriana’s boobs. The paddy wagon continued racing down the street, coming closer to us. “Swear to God—I swear on my mother. Jay, Vic, I swear on my mom I touched her tits.” The paddy wagon was fifty feet away, and closing fast, speeding toward our direction.

Then the paddy wagon screeched to a halt just behind us. We turned to see that a cop had jumped out of the passenger door and drawn down on us, his pistol aimed squarely in our direction. His partner had run around from the driver’s side and positioned himself through the open passenger window, standing behind the door and using it as a shield, gun also drawn and pointed at us. Two white guys, both in their mid-twenties, they were screaming, “Up against the fucking wall! Up against the fucking wall right now!” Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself voluntarily up against the fucking wall, standing against one of the abandoned factories, eyes closed, legs spread, arms planted firmly on the wall, just like I had seen in the movies, saying rapid-fire Our Fathers. To my right was Vic, in a similar posture, though I thought I could hear Hail Marys coming from him. To our left was Phil, standing, not facing the building but rather the cops. And he was talking. I did not see him reach into the waistband to pull out his fake gun, I only saw it in his hand. The cops’ commands had changed to “Put the fucking gun down! Put the fucking gun down! Put the fucking gun down!” as Phil stood there, the gun lamely in his right hand, shining in the streetlight, as he gesticulated and pleaded, “It’s fake! It’s fake!” The cops were unmoved and continued to yell at it him to put the fucking gun down, to slowly put it on the ground, to put it down and get up against the wall, to put it down now. Phil acquiesced, slowly bent at his knees, put his fake gun on the ground, and positioned himself on the wall next to me and Vic. The cops moved to the gun and split up: one came over to Phil and put one hand on the back of his neck and ordered his hands behind his back, while the other picked the gun off the ground.

The first words I recognized were “You motherfuckers,” followed shortly by, “It’s a fake. It’s a fucking toy.” The cop who was holding Phil’s neck let go, told him not to move, and took the gun from the other officer. He recognized that it was, as Phil had said, fake.

“You motherfucking cocksucker—you’re lucky I don’t slap the shit out of you. Unreal. Unfuckingreal.” I did not move. Neither did Vic or Phil.

“Now get the fuck out of here. Now. Stupid fucking kids. Unfuckingreal. Stupid fucking kids.”

And, yeah, we were. Stupid fucking kids.

Chapter Eleven

“Did I Ever Tell You About the Time I Got Arrested for Attempted Murder?”

F
or months, I grilled my parents while preparing for and writing this book. I sat down with each of them, together and separately, to mine their memories of any stories that I could use. I already knew of the big ones, the ones that I had heard over and over again while growing up and the ones that I lived through, but some were new to me. If there was anything that was funny, strange, or exciting that happened when I was a kid and I didn’t know about it, I needed to know—
now
. I also interviewed them to fill in the details that I couldn’t remember, either because I was too young to do so or because I didn’t realize what was really going on (as opposed to what I
thought
was going on). I was continually surprised during this part of process. Some of the things that I swore happened never actually did, or at least they did not in the way that I remembered them. It’s amazing what the subconscious can suppress or alter when it really wants to.

This is not our house. If this is your house, please call 1-800-976-TIPS.

I have no training in journalism (I have no training in anything, really, aside from maybe getting drunk and yelling at parked cars), but I worked very hard at getting these stories down. Okay, maybe not
very
hard, but certainly
reasonably
hard. After signing the book contract, I immediately went to Radio Shack and spent two hundred dollars on one of those little digital recorders. I figured I’d use it for interviews, which I would then download onto my laptop and use as my “primary source materials” as I hammered away on the book. This worked—for a little while, at least. I did get one interview on the recorder—a story about how my dad stole a car at fifteen and smashed it up—but then the batteries died. I forgot about the recorder for a few weeks until I started using it again not as an interview accessory but rather a way to record original songs of mine, which I would then email to friends.
*
Then I lost a lot of money gambling and so stopped writing songs, my inspiration having been sapped by the depression that comes with losing lots and lots of money. I’m not sure what happened to the recorder after that, but I think I lost it in a bar or something. Whatever.

The point is that what I lacked in training or technical know-how I made up for in tenacity. While preparing the book, I would call my family quite often, mostly out of the blue, to ask questions. They, particularly my mom and dad, were very patient with me, answering all my questions and queries, sometimes the same ones I had asked several times before while intoxicated or under the influence of marijuana. I ran up large phone bills, spending hours over the weeks that I was working on this book talking to my family to get every last detail in, so that when I started writing these stories, they would come to me as naturally as though they had happened just yesterday.

One of my last steps in my research process was to write up a book outline, listing each chapter and providing a short synopsis of that chapter. I went over this with my parents, taking extra care to focus on the time frame when I was either not yet born or too young to remember, to ensure at any and all costs that I had
everything
. You only get to write a memoir once, I told them, and I wanted to make sure this was the definitive version.
*
After getting assurances from both my mother and my father that I did indeed have everything, I went full-steam ahead with the book. I would contact my parents with a question here and there, but I felt like I had control of the whole process. I even handed in the manuscript a full two weeks early, which is unprecedented in the publishing industry.
*
When I did, I felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And it was time to party.