Like We Care (15 page)

A sludgy lack of purpose fell over the parking lot. Not everyone understood that a movement had begun in their midst. Many just found it fun to throw objects at a foreigner. And, besides, most had bought their cigarettes and junk food before the boycott began. For the short term anyway, how hard was it to protest when you weren’t actually giving up anything?

But Joel and Todd understood what had just happened, and truth be told, so did Wad and Slopes and the others—you didn’t hang with the likes of Joel Kasten since grade school and not gain some grasp of the potential that was there for anyone who paid attention.

Still: “Hey, where’re you going?”

Slopes was heading to the mini-mart across the street. Todd couldn’t believe their front was collapsing already.

“Berger gave me five bucks. I gotta suck him off later,” Slopes smiled, waving the five spot cheerfully. “Anybody want anything?”

“But. . . You can’t!” Todd cried, a little more shrilly than he had intended. “What’s the point if you just go buy the same crap somewhere else?”

Slopes was walking backwards with no intention of being diverted. “Dude. I gotta smoke.”

Something was within their grasp here, although even Todd couldn’t articulate it. Still, he was certain Joel felt it, too.

He turned to hand the protest off to Joel, who just waved Slopes off with a sneer.

“The fuck do I care?” he said, playing Slopes like a beef-witted Stradivarius. “The pussy can’t control his urges like a man, let him go.”

Slopes stopped dead. He couldn’t stand it when Joel turned on him.

“Hey,” he whimpered. “Come on.”

“So, Slopes,” Joel continued, “when you let that tackle from East get through the line Saturday night, damned near took my fucking head off, maybe you were too busy thinking of sneaking out for a smoke then, too, huh?”

Slopes was wounded, but he was nonetheless being drawn back to the pack. “Hey, fuck you.”

“Fuck yourself. I just need to know where your head’s at. I just need to know you’re with the team.”

They
were
a team, gathered on and around their cars. It was the only constant Slopes had ever known—that easy, non-judgmental hold of his guys. If he went across the street right now, they might all be gone when he got back.

Or worse, they’d still be there. . . but not for him.

“Shit,” he whined, rejoining the group.

His addiction was thrumming. He wasn’t going to be able to fight this forever, but for now it meant everything that he try. Everyone recognized the struggle he was facing, but no one was gay enough to actually commend him for his efforts.

“Um. Hey.”

It was Ted Eliot. Ted Eliot was a Todd Noland, maybe a notch or two below. He was always just hanging around, not so tragic as to be abused, but far from worthy enough to ever warrant attention.

Now he was standing at his open trunk, an unopened carton of Marlboros in each hand. Slopes pounced, followed by the others.

“Jesus!” Slopes marveled. “Where did you—?”

“My stepfather kicks ass on my birthday!” Ted beamed. In seventeen years, he had never felt more popular.

“Fuckin’ crack ’em open, dude,” Slopes squirmed. To Todd, this looked like one of those Nature Channel shows where a pack of lions sets to ripping apart a gazelle.

“Wait!” The crowd parted and Joel stepped up. “You’re giving these away?”

“Well, yeah. I guess,” Ted said shyly. “I mean, I thought maybe I could. . .”

Slopes started pawing at one of the cartons. Joel elbowed him away.

“All right, then here’s the plan. We’ll take these, and give them out only when somebody absolutely, positively,
has
to smoke.”

Slopes whimpered. Joel tore open the first pack and jammed a single cigarette into Slopes’ hand. “Get the fuck away from me.”

He turned to the crowd. “Anybody else got a stash, hand ’em over. Know where your parents keep theirs?” He shrugged slyly, like a Mafia don silently ordering a hit. “I ain’t sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

He was being swept up in it now. This was like all sorts of movies and TV shows he had seen, in which the leader talks fast, talks hard, and gets the troops in line.

“Anybody thinking of quitting? Do it. Anybody thinking of starting? Do it and I’ll kick your ass—freshmen, this means you. You’re too young to smoke anyway.

“We’re gonna need every cigarette we can get. We can do this.”

He looked toward the Happy Snack, where Daljit Singh was just a silhouette behind the counter—an angry silhouette, alone with his merchandise.

Joel held the two cartons of Marlboros over his head and stared down Daljit defiantly, then lowered the cartons with some ceremony into the back of Jeff Regan’s pickup truck. Additional packs were tossed in by joiners to the cause, along with some loose cigarettes. It made for a pretty pathetic collection, but the point was made.

Here were teenagers choosing to do without, to give when keeping was their nature—all in the name of a cause.

Ted Eliot, who donated the first two cartons to the campaign, was quickly elbowed back out to the periphery. Within the week, Wad Wendell would blame a truly rank fart on him in Biology, right there in front of Julie Doling, for whom Ted yearned with a crush that bordered on dementia. Thus he was marked with ridicule that would linger right up to graduation.

He didn’t come around much after that. And he never got his cigarettes back.

C
asey Lattimer would live. The security guard’s bullet had nicked his lung, but passed right through him without causing any hard damage.

He spent the night in the Frankfort hospital, Annie McCullough at his side the whole time so as to thwart any ideas he had of foraging for morphine. By the time he was ready to be released the next day, he was proudly showing off the hole in his body, offering to stick the eraser end of a pencil into it for the camera if Annie thought that might make for some “sick-ass TV.” Given the legal mess that their latest stunt had caused, Annie thought not.

Lawyers for R
²
Rev and MediaTrust were on a plane for Indiana practically before Casey made it to the emergency room. Frankfort, a town of about 15,000 people,
did
have cable, so any initial attempt to pass off Casey’s claims of critical bowel distress as legit were quickly shot down. Even if the adults who treated Casey and those who would soon file charges against him were oblivious to the celebrity in their midst, the town’s teenagers quickly blew his cover. The elders were forced to take it on faith that Casey Lattimer drew a paycheck by feigning diarrhea in cities all over Middle America.

This was serious business, Annie was quick to realize. Small towns took their institutions seriously. Moreover, Ernie Stanz, the elderly bank guard, was in intensive care right down the hall from Casey, suffering from the trauma of being forced to discharge his weapon for the first time in his career. It was touch-and-go during the early stages, doctors afraid that the old man had succumbed to a stroke.

And all for some revolting stunt, pulled off by a bunch of punk New Yorkers, out to have fun at the expense of the good people of Frankfort?

Until the lawyers arrived, it fell on Annie’s shoulder to endure the town’s wrath.

“It’s a TV show?” asked an incredulous Randy Tupper, a 56-year-old police sergeant with a flattop and a veiny, bulbous nose. “About going to the bathroom?”

“It’s not
about
going to the bathroom,” Annie said weakly. “Casey gets into situations with everyday people, and sometimes it turns out to be funny.”

“My nephew says your friend—” Sgt. Tupper squinted to read his notes, then stared over his half-glasses at Annie. —“farts on people.”

She coughed. “He might, for instance, go into a shoe store, and he’ll sit there trying on shoes, with the employee of the shoe store kneeling there in front of him, and he’ll. . . emit gas.

“It’s. . . Our viewers just think it’s funny.”

“Like
Candid Camera
?”

“Yes!”

He grunted wearily, reminded for the umpteenth time how everything that used to be innocent had been bastardized and perverted to conform to a world that was certainly rocketing straight to hell.

“You get a permit to film here?”

“Yes!” Annie offered eagerly. Permits were a hit-or-miss thing. Mercifully, in this case, she had attempted to go by the book. “We went straight to your City Hall to find out which ordinances we needed to be aware of. I think you’ll find that everything was done to code.”

“And you alerted them to the fact that there might be. . . farting involved?”

“We told them we were gathering material for a television program, which, in fact, we were. We would’ve been happy to offer specifics if we had been asked.”

“I guess they trusted you.”

“I guess so.”

He put down his notepad and stared at her. She was so young, so pretty—and wired in a way that was completely alien to him. He felt oddly protective of her, at the same time that he wanted to wring her neck. And this was a
girl
.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“And you’re a. . .” He consulted his notes again. “. . .
vice president?”

“Vice President of Special Projects, yes.” She cleared her throat and sat up straighter. “I know it seems unlikely to you, but what I do is actually kind of important to the people I work for.”

“My brother-in-law was just made vice president down at the bank. He’s forty-eight.”

“Well, these are completely different environments,” Annie said, trying to sound like an adult. “I’m sure he has completely different responsibilities than I do.”

“I’d imagine.” Sgt. Tupper flipped through his pad. “Heard from the airport about a half-hour ago. They got a call asking if they had runway enough to handle some kind of private jet out of New York. I assume they’re with you?”

“My superiors wanted to send out a team in order to hopefully resolve this as quickly as possible.”

“Any more vice presidents?”

“Pretty much all of them.”

She smiled hopefully, brushing a wisp of hair from her face and tracing circles on the knee of her jeans. The cop couldn’t figure her out.

“
How
old are you?” the cop asked again.

The lawyers made quick work of the case. MediaTrust, whose vast network of cable systems nationwide included a chokehold on Frankfort, was able to placate the town fathers by shaving a few cents off the city’s cable rates. The savings were then routed into municipal coffers for new public works projects that would make the Common Council appear proactive and competent when the next set of elections rolled around.

The district attorney, who had responded to public outrage by railing long and hard about his intent to extract vengeance from the Big City demons, was able to wriggle out of his hard-line stance thanks entirely to the efforts of the Big City defendant.

It turned out that when struck by the bullet, Casey Lattimer had excreted approximately twelve milliliters of fecal matter—not an uncommon reaction to sudden, blunt trauma, a local doctor testified. With this remarkably good bit of evidence in hand, R
²
Rev’s lawyers were then able to argue that despite the defendant’s established pattern of inciting confrontation by faking an urgent need to defecate, it was conceivable that, in the specific instance before the court, Mr. Lattimer was sincere in his frenetic requests for a bathroom.

The district attorney and the judge, most interested in quickly resolving the case and expelling these people from their town, punted. The R
²
Rev attorney who happened upon what shortly became known as the “doodie defense,” sparing his employers an expensive and embarrassing court case, returned to New York a hero.

And Casey Lattimer found himself out of a job, Hutch Posner having finally been forced to concede that Casey simply embodied the R
²
Rev philosophy too enthusiastically to be contained. It was one thing to promulgate—from a safe distance—a lifestyle steeped in debauchery and culture defamation, but it was quite another to claim
responsibility
for such a lifestyle, almost like a parent. While R
²
Rev
⁴
Films, the company’s motion picture arm, still coveted Casey for what was being referred to as the
Dumb Ass
series (
Dumb Ass Goes To College, Dumb Ass Joins the Navy, Hey! Dumb Ass!
), Hutch determined that it was best to simply sever all ties.

It was a melancholy decision for Hutch. In his way, the kid had served the net well, and had made himself a nice chunk of change in the process. Hutch hoped he could comfortably go back to a life of farting on an amateur basis, purely for the love of it.

On the night the video of his shooting debuted in a prime, maniacally-promoted Saturday night slot, Casey received a new pair of underpants— and a firm boot back to obscurity. Mimi SoWett, slow to realize that Casey thought his sacking was merely an on-air goof, told the viewers that their Casey was leaving R
²
Rev for bigger and better things. Within three years, he was driving a school bus. Then he probably died young or something.