The McGillicuddy Book of Personal Records (3 page)

“This as nice as your bedroom at Gertie's?” she asked. He'd made sure she'd never poked her nose inside that bedroom, either.

Lee shrugged his shoulders. “'Bout the same.”

Rhonda pointed to a framed photograph on the wall. “That your decreased father or sumthin'?”

Lee sat upright. “The word is
deceased
, ya blockhead!” he said, “and
no
, that is not my dad. It just happens to be the one and only Albert Einstein, the Father of Relativity. Cheeeez!”

Rhonda shrugged. “Least he's
some
body's father.” She ambled over to his desk and took a leisurely look at the stuff heaped there: three old Eatmore wrappers, a dirty hacky sack that looked like it had landed in Santiago's dinner bowl (or worse), and a half-eaten sandwich of peanut butter and … something red.

“Peanut butter and
ketchup
?” she said, faking a gag.

Lee rolled on his side, clutching his stomach. “Come on,” he groaned, “give a guy a break.” She picked up a crumpled English essay, flattened it out, and looked at the mark on the last page—C-minus. She re-scrunched it and picked up something else. “What was his name, anyhow?”

“Whose?”

“Your decreased … I mean, your dead dad.”

Long pause. “Frankin,” said Lee wearily—he knew what was coming.

“Frankin?” She let out a hoot. “As in, like …
Frankin
stein?”

“No,” said an impatient Lee, “Frankin is short for
frankin
cense … you know, gold, frankincense, and myrrh? He was born on Christmas Day—what can I say?” Lee rolled over so his back faced Rhonda. “Mostly people just called him Frankinstein, though.” He didn't bother spilling the fact that his own nickname for his dad had been Frankindad.

“Yeah, okay, so what's this?” said Rhonda, grown tired of the subject. She held up a small wooden plaque with a smooth black stone glued to its center.

“Black Cat,” mumbled Lee into his pillow.

“That some kind of precious stone, or what?”

“Black Cat
bub
ble gum, bozo,” he said. “When I was nine, I chewed that piece eight hours every day for exactly one year.” Lee rolled onto his back and rubbed his stomach in a slow circular motion the way his mother used to when he was a kid with a bellyache. He could suddenly taste Black Cat in the back of his throat, and it made him wish the stuff had never been invented. “Can we drop the food references?” he said.

That's not all Rhonda let drop. The plaque fell from her fingers like a hot potato.

“Hey! Careful,” said Lee. Rhonda wiped her hands on the back of her jeans as if she'd just picked up someone's wet Kleenex by mistake.

“Hey, neato,” she said, once she'd recovered. “Where'd you get this?” She was looking up at a poster on his wall that said:
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS
.
“Shoot,” she said, trying to cover the picture of a fried egg for the sake of Lee's stomach. But it was no good. Even if Lee couldn't see the egg, he could remember the snot-like, membrany, slippy-slidy egg innards of every egg he'd ever cracked in his life. He covered his head with his pillow.

“Sorry,” said Rhonda. She sat down at his computer and he heard her tapping away, clicking with the mouse.

“What're you doing?”

“Nothing.”

*&@#@**#!!
He badly wished she'd go and do
nothing
someplace else!

Instead, Rhonda ran a finger down the ribs of his perfectly stacked CDs, and along the spines of the books on his shelf. Lee knew it irritated Rhonda that he seemed always to have his nose stuck in a book. Once she'd grabbed a hardcover novel out of his hand and cranged him over the head with it. To get back at her, he'd shot her one of the many famous sayings he had stored in his head (another habit of his that bugged her butt)—“Groucho Marx once said: ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.'” Lee smiled now to think how grouchy that had made her.

Rhonda snatched a book from the shelf. “Hemingway, huh? La-
dee
-da.” Rhonda fanned through the pages. “This crappy, or what?”

“The Old Man and the Sea?”
Lee peeked out from under his pillow. “You haven't read it?”

“Nope.”

Lee patted the side of his bed and whistled for his dog, “Come on, girl, up you come.” Santiago jumped up and tried licking Lee's face. “My dad named Santiago after the guy in that book. He read it to me twice before he …” Lee hated using the word
died
. It somehow seemed like one of those embarrassing words not to be used in mixed company. For once he was glad when Rhonda cut him off.

“Whoa, back up. Your dad named your female dog after an
old man
?”

“Give it here,” said Lee, reaching for the book as if to rescue it. It was worn and dog-eared. He didn't need Rhonda guessing that he'd flipped through those pages more than a couple of dozen times in the last few years.

Great. Lee could see Rhonda working up to some kind of idiotic question by the way she gave her nose a double upward swipe.

“So …” she said.

Yep, bring it on, sister, thought Lee, wondering if he was about to woof his cookies again.

“So, like, what did your old man do for a living and how'd he croa …” Lee watched Rhonda hesitate. He'd give her credit— even
she
couldn't be that much of an insensitive schmuck. Rhonda looked down at her fingernails as if she'd found something intriguing there. “So, like, what I mean to say is … how'd he, like … pass out?”

Lee let his head drop and grabbed the roots of his hair. “It's pass
on
, ya brickhead.” He would have laughed if he hadn't felt like barfing.

“Pass out, pass on, what
ever
,” said Rhonda, “If you don't wanna tell me, just …”

“Don't have a hairy fit,” said Lee. Truth is, Lee liked talking about his father's profession. “He was a photographer, if you must know.”

Rhonda gave Lee a sarcastic “wowzers!” look. “Photographer as in … like …
click-click-click
all day long?”

Lee could see she didn't have an appreciation for the finer things. “Hey,” he said, “my dad was the best at what he did. He even won awards.”

He could see she was still unimpressed—he guessed she'd wanted to hear him say something cool like “broncobuster” or “movie stuntman.”

“Hey,” he said, “there were times his job was really dangerous.”

“Well, I guess
so
!” grinned Rhonda. “A sprained index finger can be a serious thing.”

“Yeah, well, even
you
would think twice about photographing a wild grizzly in the bush.
And
,” he added, “he had to have mega patience and super stamina for his job.”

He waited for Rhonda to ask why, but of course …

Sigh. “Yeah,” continued Lee stubbornly, “there were times when he'd sit in a boat with his camera focused, waiting with steel nerves to catch a shot of a jumping fish. And if he didn't get the shot that day, he'd go back the next.”

Lee didn't care that Rhonda looked like she could care less. He continued. “He once took a picture of a jumping marlin that was so spectacular, it ended up in
National Geographic
.” Lee rubbed his queasy stomach under the blankets. “And later he totally got into video cameras—we have a stack of nutty home movies that reach the family room ceiling.” As soon as he'd said it, he knew it was a mistake. Next week he'd come home to find Gertrude, who needed no begging, showing Rhonda footage of himself, starkers in the bathtub. Lee decided to zip his lips. Anyhow, it was none of her business how his dad died. She didn't need to know about the poor guy's blocked arteries. That part he wasn't fond of talking about.

“Still got his camera?” asked Rhonda. The question surprised Lee.

“And what if I did?”

Rhonda turned her back toward him. “Just wondered if you ever fiddled with it.” Another swipe of the nose.

“Yeah, right,” said Lee. “That'd be like some amateur picking up Elvis's guitar and forcing it to squawk.”

“Hmm …” said Rhonda. Lee didn't bother guessing the meaning of her tone. What did she know, anyway? Not much. And he meant to keep it that way.

Crap, thought Lee, next thing you know she'll be straining across my bed trying to read my wall. Sure as spit, right on cue, Rhonda piped up with: “What are
those
?” pointing to the curling strips of paper held to his wall with masking tape.

Truth is, Lee was a closet quote-junkie—ever since the day he'd been searching the Web and clicked the pop-up “fart button” for a free download that invited him to
Climb inside the heads of the Famous, the Great, and the Successful!! Receive a new “SmartQuote” every day and
GET SMART
. For Lee, it had been a no-brainer. Yeah! Why not pick the brains of the brilliant who have already test-driven life and figured it all out? He'd learned all about his computer by reading
PCS for Dummies.
A quote a day could very well be the equivalent to
Life's Secrets For Dumb-dumbs
.

For months now, he'd been receiving and memorizing quotes from the brilliant (and occasionally, not so brilliant). Things like:

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails.

Some works. You do more of what works.

– Leonardo da Vinci

If you don't want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do:

Pour a little Listerine in the toilet.

– Jay Leno

In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back.

– Charlie Brown

But it was the Albert Einstein gems that seemed to grab his attention the most, and he faithfully copied those down on scraps of paper whenever they appeared on his computer screen, and stuck them to the wall. 'Course, Lee had no desire to share them with Rhonda today (or
any
day), so he diverted her attention.

“Say, do you think you could pass me that ginger ale?”

She did, but resumed her snooping the minute the bottle left her fingers. Lee was getting more than a little peeved. Rhonda totally ignored him when he told her to put his baseball cap back where she'd found it,
please
—on the head of his life-sized cardboard cutout of Albert Einstein. Rhonda put it on her own head, instead. She turned the peak to the back, pulled up a wooden chair, and sat on it backwards. Resting her chin on the back of the chair, she took a good long look at Lee.

“Why do you do it?” she finally asked.

“What?”

“Knock yourself out over all this stuff. What's so important about bouncing a basketball twelve hours straight?”

Lee rolled his eyeballs again—
ouch!
He sighed.

“It's all about the zone,” he mumbled, not expecting Rhonda, of all people, to understand. He could see her about to interrogate him so he cut her off. “You know, the
zone
?” (Like, duh … no harm in making her feel a bit dumb in the process.) “You enter the zone when you're concentrating so hard, the rest of the world doesn't exist. It's just you and the basketball. It's not you and your homework, or you and your crappy marks, or you and your boring, unexceptional existence. It's you, the ball, and the record you're trying to set.” Lee tucked the sheet under his chin. “And besides,” he said, wishing he had his zone back to himself again, “it gives me time to think.”

Most of the time, he gave Rhonda only partial or guarded truths about himself—you couldn't be too careful with girls, he figured. But today, he didn't have the energy to pick and choose his words. “Makes the waiting easier.”

“Waiting? For what?”

Lee remained silent.

“Come on,” she said. He closed his eyes.

“For whatever it is I'm going to be good at one of these days.” Lee lifted himself up on one elbow. “Rhonda, do you ever feel … I don't know, a kind of
fire
blazing inside, like a crazy yearning-burning in your guts, or your heart?”

“Heartburn? Heck, yeah, I ate a bowl of Agnes's chili once and—”

“No,” he said. He lay back on his pillow and looked at the ceiling. Nothing was ever easy with Rhonda. He tried a different route. “Did you know that Albert Einstein's teachers pretty much decided he was one-crayon-short-of-a-full-box when he was a kid?”

“Yeah, right.”

“No,
really
. They labeled him a ‘slow learner' and a ‘daydreamer.' And he was crappy at sports, too.”

“Yeah, so what about it?” said Rhonda.

“Do you think that as a kid he had any idea of how great he would be one day? Do you think it's possible that he felt his greatness burning away in his heart, even before he knew what it would be?”

For a second, Lee thought he caught a flash of something in Rhonda's eyes, as if she maybe understood what he was talking about all too well. But she looked away before he could read her. He flopped back down on his pillow. All he really wanted was sleep, but Rhonda was so crummy at taking a hint. He reached down and picked up the empty four-liter ice cream pail his mother had left on the floor beside his bed—“just in case.”

“What are you doing?” asked Rhonda.

Lee held his head over the bucket and pretended to gag. Rhonda jumped up and hightailed it out of there. “I just remembered,” she called on her way down the hall. “I have a guitar lesson in a minute. Sorry I can't stay.”

Lee put the bucket down and closed his eyes. He opened them a second later when he heard the screen saver on his computer click in. Oh, brother. He watched the huge floating letters waltz across the screen in a never-ending parade:
RON RONALDSON ROCKS RON RONALDSON ROCKS RON RONALDSON ROCKS RON RONALDSON ROCKS RON
.