Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (2 page)

“Cares about what, Mom! Cares about what!” I say.

“Nate cares about Applebee's. And Necro. And helping Toby pick up prosti-tots at the mall.”

“Funny, Mom! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Necro's got a job at Kodak! And Toby's twenty-two now. He's got his own place.”

“Well I doubt that will last very long—not on his budget.” She laughs. When Mom actually does laugh, it's one word: Ha!

The plate Mom sets in front of me wobbles flat—like when a quarter runs out of spin.

“But what does a dream like that tell you, Nate?”

“That you still have to work at Kinko's on weekdays?”

He nods and twists his goatee with his thumb and index finger. “That's fair, that's fair,” he says. “My only point, Nate, is
the bad decisions are just as good as the good decisions. After several bad decisions amid a time of deep personal turbulence and cafard, I came to understand that I was touring the Yemeni city of Taiz, and as I became more consumed with the turbulence, I woke up in my hotel room one morning to find myself blind in my right eye. My vision would later return, but right then, I threw out my maps and wandered east, for days, among the qat fields. A group of teenagers driving an El Camino with a Howitzer mounted to the back pulled up next to me. A boy in a Walter Payton jersey approached me, drew a glass shard or perhaps a jambiya, and screamed at me in maybe a form of Zabidi …”

“Gareth!” Mom says, laughing one Ha! “You didn't have an itinerary?”

“I was a journeyman!” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “I was taking in the stars! When life gives you lemons, you
live
.”

When the phone rings, I forget it's been in my lap, and I scoop it before it hits the floor and run into the hallway. The background noise on Necro's end sounds like rows of shopping carts crashing over and over.

“We're going to take and go to W—p—ns of Ma—at 7!” he yells, in his Section-8 Murman Riot voice, like he's giving orders, not even saying “Hey,” or “Sorry I didn't call back.”

“What?” I yell back. “Where were you? I was worried! Textbook Colonel Hellstache!”

“Take and—b—move—out now!” he yells again. “We're all going to take and go to Weapons— nk. Meet—T–by, L— Ch—se and Wicked College John! Take and go to Kodak Park!”

Which is already Bad Sign No. 1: Two out of every five Colonel Hellstache nights, historically, have begun with Necro calling and yelling at me in his Section-8 Murman Riot voice. And I wonder if I should bring him the scrap of paper that only had the word
FUCK
written on it, which Mom found in my closet when she was stuffing my old clothes into garbage bags and hanging up her blouses, so I could tell Necro: Remember when we found this Certificate of Fuck downtown, at the Pontillo's Where the Telephones Were Answered by Cats? Which maybe he'd like, and it would distract him from being Section-8 Murman. Then I say, almost by accident: Maybe I am too old for this. Or maybe what I really want is to be old, so I could stay in without worrying.

But, as with most other points in my life, I'm opening the sliding door of my bedroom closet to get my Bills jacket, and leaving.

“Going out with
Necro
?” Mom says when I walk back out into the kitchen.

“Necco, what?” Fake Dad No. 3 says.

“His name is Andrea. We call him Necro,” I say.

“He moved from Louisiana,” Mom says. “The Fanto family. An army family. Nate dropped his MCC classes”—she slows her voice down and lowers it to impersonate Necro—“so they could
take
and run away and get married.”

“Ha Ha Ha Ha Mom! Real original! Ha Ha Ha Ha!”

“Well,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, almost lispily. “Does he stick around at night?”

Which you could even ask thirteen nights ago, on New
Year's Eve, the second-to-last time Necro, me, Toby, and Lip Cheese would all stick around in the same place together. The ball dropped and, hours later, the channels went to carpet deodorant commercials. Miles of not talking between us in my basement, sitting on the crusted-over couch, when Necro leaned forward, head between his knees, and then flung himself back into the couch, violently, body bouncing forward slightly, squeaking the couch hinges, ponytail hairband flying off somewhere. Nobody spoke. The TV lit the basement's gray-painted concrete floor like the light of a fish tank. Toby leaned into the armrest on one end of the couch. Lip Cheese, on the other, tucked his knees into his T-shirt, greasing up a pillowcase. We threw our jackets over ourselves, and on the floor, I slid my hands between my knees and we fell asleep.

On New Year's Day evening, with hangover filth shrink-wrapped to our tongues, we woke up. The sun was almost down, like a nectarine cooling on ice. It felt like every Sunday evening ever condensed, drifting in thicker than dishwasher steam, and there was no way I would even say thirty words that day. We high stepped through the snow in my front yard to go to Toby's car and drove to maybe Jay's or the Highland for an omelet, and outside, it was 1999.

Kodak's Eastman Avenue parking lot is broad enough to see the earth curving, empty except for Necro's Vomit Cruiser at the opposite end. Necro sits Indian-style on the hood, and when I pull in with Mom's car, I jam my foot into my gas pedal and assassin-rifle toward him. Wind slices off the windshield; ice patches crunch beneath the tires—total Nate Memorial Satan-Way.

I'm already cracking up, already way too excited. Necro's cardboard-colored parka, which we agreed would be inducted into the Necro Hall of Fame, is zipped to his nose. He waves, arm like a windmill blade, and I slide my hands around the steering wheel, as if I'm losing control, and yell, like I'm going to hit him: “no, No, No! NO!
NO!
”

I choke down on the brake pedal—smoke rises into the seat wells; an earthquake under me as the car swings out from behind. Necro slips on a mini-ice-continent on the hood of the Vomit Cruiser and falls hands-first to the ground.

“Colonel
Hellstache
!” he yells, wiping snow scum off his jeans when I get out.

“It's Nate Memorial Satan-Way. I always stop. I stopped a parking space away.”

“Colonel Sandbags Ladyface Hellstache, Nate!” he says.

“Colonel Sitz-Bath Wolfhound Hellstache, Necro.”

He squints at me, his triangle Dracula eyebrows narrowed in, acne scars extra pink in the cold.

“Are you actually mad?” I say.

He sits on the Vomit Cruiser's hood. The wind blows a single corkscrew of hair out from his ponytail and freezes the leftover shower-water in my slicked-back hockey hair.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I say.

He clenches and unclenches his hand, where a pebble is lodged in his palm. Except now we're not saying anything. And I'm picking apart the pocket lining of my Bills jacket, because I can't tell if we're not talking because we're best friends and we don't need to talk sometimes, or if it's because I truly crossed the border into The Uncomebackable Realm of Colonel Hellstache, and maybe I should have only done Nate Happy Meal Satan-Way and not Memorial-level Satan-Way.

Because now, all Necro's doing is rolling his hand, moping at it. Like a total Hashbrown Gargoyle.

Silver pipes—some thin like bendy straws, others large enough to crawl through—run along the brick buildings of the Kodak Park production plant across the street. Men walk slowly in and out of the factory, the beep and a click, way off, from the turnstile door when they hold up their scan passes. Some of the thinner staff, managers maybe, are still wearing
their protective glasses over their regular glasses. Others have purple around their eyes and thick stubble, like they had their faces professionally tinted; undershirts under open jackets, work boots in grocery bags.

So I say, just to say something: “Kodak Park Hair-Vest Cavalry, on a Friday night. Men who filter their coffee with their underwear.”

Necro breathes deeply and drops his shoulders, like he has to reach down and lift his mouth from a well to even talk to me: “Off to take and treat themselves to the new upscale Subway, in Pittsford.”

My brain is sweating, looking for any addition.

“What if they took and had new, like, palatial food there,” Necro goes on. “Like a condor wrap?”

I'm tearing through the Joke Rolodex—a mummified sandwich found in the Pyramids; a sandwich prechewed by a cast member of
Party of Five
—and when I settle on one, it feels like I have to hurry it out of a burning building.

“A condor wrap with diamond sauce?”

“A sub made from the thigh meat of one of Winston Churchill's generals?” he says.

“Maybe, like, a sandwich that's so upscale they won't let you see it.”

“When you order the sandwich they take and blindfold you and drive you into the mountains and make you eat it at gunpoint.”

“You eat it and a forty-five-year-old man turns into a swan.”

“You eat it and it frees all the hostages, you know, from Lebanon,” he says.

“What?”

“I don't know.”

And with that we've made, maybe, our last joke. Our first joke, and still the funniest word in the history of language? “Pants.” “Satan” is close seconds, but Pants is Joke Royalty. Pants became Pants the night I slept over at Necro's utility-shed-sized house in the woods in Spencerport. Before we put on
Dream On
, we snuck upstairs from the basement to make sure Necro's dad was asleep. But among the stacks of yellowing mail, next to the empty gasoline tanks on the floor, Necro's dad sat upright on the sofa, asleep, tattoos up to his neck, naked except for a condom, every light in the house still on, but his pants were folded, neatly, on the cigarette-burned carpet. And then Necro yelled, wailing like he was in pain: “Oh God my
pants
!” and we rumbled back down the steps, sputtering laughter, palms skimming the stair railings.

Necro could have said anything then—even some vocab word he'll use when he can't think of a simpler one—and it still would've been the funniest thing. We became friends. And Pants became Jetpants when Necro crashed his ATV into a dirt bank in the woods, and his body flew over the handlebars, legs still bent into sitting position. And Jetpants gave us Necro's prescription Percocets, which gave me any night we stood on the trestles, my thinking cool and cube-like. And Jetpants became Maverick Jetpants when me and Necro Maverick Jetpantsed out of high school forever.

But that was two years ago, and now Necro works in Chemical Recycling in Building 38, and tonight the sky is the color of sheep wool, getting bluer with evening. Above us, a
plane flies across the lot where, at the opposite end, there's a tower that looks like a milk crate. Steam exhales from it at all hours. Necro stiffens his left arm, raises it upward, draws his right arm back like he's aiming a bow and arrow, and opens his fist, fingers spread straight, and, quietly, we look up. The imaginary arrow makes a perfect curve through the air toward the plane. When the plane flies just over the tower, Necro makes a saliva-y explosion noise, and I realize we were thinking the same thing.

This won't last all day. Soon Toby and Lip Cheese and Wicked College John, who's back home for January break, will be here. So I go: “Man, what are we going to do?”

“You mean, tonight?” Necro says.

“Like, overall,” I say. “Like, a Plan. Like, I gotta start making that money.”

Necro scratches the back of his head, the way he does whenever he's about to say something serious and maybe nice. “I think, with you, Nate, it's a matter of finding—”

Then I hear from behind:
BWOAAAA!

Which I expect to be Toby. But instead, it's some different shaved-headed guy I don't even know. He's wearing a wifebeater and a leather vest, and these army pants tucked into Nazi-type boots tied tight around his legs. His arms are as muscleless as the vanilla flats of an ice-cream sandwich. He has this sneery look on his face, with wire-rimmed glasses—not exactly a Rambo's Rambo. Necro doesn't even introduce me, so I'm immediately calling the guy Rambocream.

And—like this isn't Textbook Colonel Hellstache at all—Necro proceeds to actually give Rambocream a man-hug!

“And a splendid greeting to you, Sir Pocketwatch-pants Von Moneycolon!” Rambocream bellows, like banquets and chimneys.

“And a good evening to you, Sir Spectacles Von Snifter-pants!” Necro foghorns back.

I breathe down a heart tornado. Because, Necro! You use Pants with someone not named me? He's even laughing differently—this throat-cackle, when I'd counted so many nights as Nights of Quickness whenever I could get Necro to push some air through his nose.

So when Toby's car makes a wide turn across the lot's empty lanes and parks next to the Vomit Cruiser, it's clear that this is going to be the World's Most Colonel Hellstache Evening. “What is this Voltron of Retargery?” Toby says, looking over at Rambocream. “Who's Poached Death?”

“Brandon,” Rambocream says, extending his hand to Toby.

And this, at least, makes me crack up. Because it would take easily 3.5 Rambocreams to out-huge Toby—and Rambocream's hand is just out there, getting pinker. And Toby just leans back, clapping his Bills mittens together, smiling with his little baby gremlin teeth. Rambocream's glasses frost up into silver dollars. Toby flares his chinfat, shaved head steaming. Then he shakes Rambocream's hand anyway.