Going Nowhere Faster Page 2

  A pair of headlights crested the hill. They were way behind, and then I barely had time to take a breath before they were right behind me. An engine growled, LOUD, then louder, the car roaring past, too fast and too close as I skidded to the side of the road.

  “Nice driving, GENIUS!” I yelled, the car already gone, over the hill in a wisp of exhaust. Top-notch insult, Stan. Way to crush them, verbally and emotionally. “Genius” was what Keith usually called me (obviously without having read any of my scripts). It’s a word that tends to lurk. My mother never says anything (“genius”), and my father never says anything (“genius”), but I know they sometimes look at me strangely, not because I’m strange (even though I am) but because I just said something that probably should have come out of someone else’s mouth. Someone older and smarter and less Stan-like. Which is amazing, since when I was in second grade I could barely write at all. My classmates all made it to advanced cursive, penning capital C ’s and ornate T ’s and generally making the teachers happy with their evident potential. My handwriting was so bad they thought I might have a tumor. First I was sent to the doctor. No tumor. So then they thought I might be Just Plain Dumb.

  Administrator: “Does he drool?”

  Teacher: “I don’t think so.”

  Administrator: “Does he eat glue?”

  Teacher: “Not that I’ve seen.”

  Administrator: “Does he frequently sniff his fingertips?”

  Teacher: “Actually, now that you mention it . . .”

  Administrator: “Let’s test him.”

  So they showed me circles and squares and triangles and asked which didn’t belong (duh, the Stan one). Or read analogies, like “Fish is to water as Stan is to . . .” (drowned?). Afterward, I was sure they were right and I was even dumber than your run-of-the-mill finger-sniffer, but the results came back and after a lot of hemming and hawing and calls to the state testing board and calls to my parents and possibly even an aborted call to the local news station, it turned out I had an eyecue of 165. Go figure.

  I stood up on the pedals again, pumping away, working hard to make it to the top of the hill. Halfway there I noticed another pair of headlights. This time they weren’t racing, just lingering on the horizon, keeping pace. They were round like the other car’s. They were big like the other car’s.

  I pedaled faster.

  So the teachers stopped caring about my handwriting or laughing out of turn or making fart sounds with my armpit, and pretty much left me alone. Actually, from that point on they seemed to fear me. My father said, “Most teachers top out in the eighty to one hundred range as far as intelligence quotient, and I think that’s being generous, so naturally you’re an anomaly.” I was in second grade and knew what an anomaly was, so, of course, I went to my room and cried. Why would anyone fear me? I spent a majority of my time picking my nose or reading books about courageous Irish setters. It all seemed so unfair. At least for a couple of weeks, until I forgot all about it. I mean, how smart can you really be reading Dr. Seuss and playing kickball?

  “Hey, guy, throw that here.”

  “Um, okay.”

  The road flattened and I picked up speed, leaning over the handlebars and shifting into low. My tires hummed. The headlights kept their distance.

  The real problems began in sixth grade, when I was taken out of regular classes and placed in Assisted Learning, which meant spending all day in a room with Ms. Cobble (cognitive specialist), Ms. Vanderlink (clinical child psychologist), and seven other kids bussed in from around the state. There were beanbag chairs and orange walls and an always-on coffeemaker we dropped crayons and lint and nickels into. Ms. Cobble was round, had a head like a squash, and smelled like eau du Velveeta. Ms. Vanderlink was thin and wore black turtlenecks and pointy glasses and seemed, to the exclusion of almost everything else, preoccupied with removing lint from her clothing. We spent entire afternoons playing with clay (making enormous-breasted sculptures of Cobble and then crushing them) and drawing (sketching enormous-breasted Vanderlink tied to a tree and shot with arrows.) For some reason, we never got into trouble. “Discipline” was apparently equated with “creativity stifling.” No matter what horror we concocted, Cobble continued to guzzle her tar-and-floater coffee and Vanderlink continued to remove nonexistent fluff from her shoulders. It was accepted, after all, on some unspoken level, that none of us would ever be considered normal.

  “Hey, aren’t you the kid from the egghead class?”

  “No. Aren’t you the egg from the kidhead class?”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “That make even sense doesn’t.”

  Punch.

  “Ouch.”

  Still, every one of my classmates has gone on to great success. Millie Crown, her nose an endless faucet and shirt a bottomless repository, went to Juilliard to study violin. Paul Stark, extraordinarily thin and with a penchant for torturing Goober, the class gerbil, won a language scholarship and moved to Indonesia to live with natives (who later crowned him Sun King). Even Kate Bellner, who would burst into tears if you even thought about looking at her sideways, now writes a column on the “Young Adult Beat” for The Washington Post.

  Have I mentioned my name’s Stan and I work in a video store?

  I approached a long downward slope, pedaling madly before the steep incline that led to my parents’ house. The bike whirred as I leaned over it, momentum and gravity and wind, a sixty-second mad rush that made me open my mouth and howl. For one second I actually outran myself, the shadow-on shadow of peeled Stan-ness dragging behind the back wheel. But then, of course, the second was over. My shadow caught up and my legs surrendered to the rise, slowing, a sudden raincoat of sweat and gravity and inertia that felt like every minute of every day and almost everything else.

  Also, the headlights got a little closer. I tried to keep my sandals from slipping off the grips.

  When the money finally ran out for the Assisted Learning program (the Play-Doh costs alone must have been staggering) and it was canceled by a unanimous vote of the school board, and Cobble and Vanderlink were sent packing, probably to teach poetry in a maximum security women’s prison, and as a result, for the first time in years, I was sent to regular classes, I got beat up a lot.

  Is that why, you may ask, poor Mr. 165 eye-cue, you get straight Ds?

  It’s actually an excellent question. One Dr. Felder really tries to “get at.”

  Dr. Felder: “How’s school?”

  Me: “Aside from every single second being just another opportunity for embarrassment and humiliation?”

  Dr. Felder: “Yes, aside from that.”

  Me: “It sucks.”

  Dr. Felder: “Okay. Then let’s talk about how ‘sucks’ feels.”

  Me: “That’s a joke, right?”

  The truth is, I just don’t know. At some point, in class, I can’t make my brain work. It freezes. Goes into sleep mode. Winters in Palm Springs. The teacher will ask, “Who knows the name of the estate Thomas Jefferson designed and built in Virginia?”

  I do. It’s called Monticello.

  But when I open my mouth, “Monticello” never comes out. Nothing does. Or maybe something like “mayonnaise” or “moray eel” might, which is even worse. Then everyone laughs. They laugh, and I mentally attempt, like a dwarf star, to collapse in on myself due to my own incredible field of gravity.

  I should probably mention, at this point, that I’m disabled.

  I know, I know, it’s totally not fair that I held that back for so long.

  I guess I just didn’t want your pity.

  The truth of the matter is that I have a rare medical condition known as Mentasis Futilis. There’s a telethon every year called the Mentathalon. You may have seen it. You may even have called in and pledged a nickel. All-girl lip-synch bands lip-synch, and fat comedians make fat jokes, and skinny comedians make skinny jokes, and out-of-work jugglers drop chain saws and bowling pins on their feet. Some guy in a sequined jacket begs
you to call in and begs you to “pledge now” and begs you to feel sorry for me and all those like me.

  It’s a good thing there’s 462 other channels on cable, because, to be honest, it’s pretty unwatchable. Plus, there’s no cure.

  Okay, okay. I made all that up. I’m as fit as seventeen years of downing gallons of carrot pulp could possibly make me. To tell the truth, I actually wish I did have some kind of disease. At least then I’d have an excuse. I think the real reason my brain freezes is because I’m a chickenshit.

  I hunched over, taking the long wide turn before my parents’ street. The headlights were closer. A LOT closer. The car came up to my back wheel, high beams on. I waved it by, but it stayed there, inching forward. There was nowhere to pull off the street without wiping out in sharp rocks and gravel, and there was no way I could pedal faster. I looked back, almost blinded, circles and stars behind my eyes. What did they want? Was it Chad Chilton? Was it just some crazy old lady?

  The car beeped and lurched ahead. The bumper almost touched my wheel. The engine growled and I could barely keep control. In one long careening sweep, I got to my parents’ lawn and jumped the curb. My front tire caught on a log and I went over the handlebars, crashing into a patch of tall grass. The car laid rubber and sped away. I threw a rock at it, which missed by only about five hundred yards. Crickets boomed and my head boomed like it was hollow, one artery trying desperately to channel blood and fear and relief. It only took about a half hour for that to go away. In the meantime, no beautiful nurses came running up to wipe my forehead with a cold rag. I checked my arms and legs. Nothing broken. Mostly normal, if by normal you mean skinny and unmuscular. But someone was crazy. Maybe I was crazy. It occurred to me that I should have gotten the license plate. Sergeant Rick Steele would have gotten the license plate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE BLAIR hippie Zen WITCH who sells spinach to strangers PROJECT

  I hid my bike in a furrow of gooseberries and snuck around the house, past the spinach patch and the tractor and the wood hut (Smith’s Natural Foods and Gifts) where my mother’s Zen-buddy Prarash sold organic (mealy) produce, and scrambled onto the back porch, breathing heavily. The gift hut cast one long angular shadow that folded into the trees. The whole farm was dark and crickety and scary, and it didn’t help that our house looked like a haunted scrap pile, hunkered in the center of a half dozen vegetable patches, three wings of the house jutting like spokes, one still unfinished and the third completely unused. My father designed and built it himself. “Designed” might actually be the wrong word. More like “haphazarded.” There were hallways that lead nowhere and doors that frequently opened to nothing, or even worse, concrete or brick. When I was younger, I was always stepping into unfinished rooms and smashing my face, and my nose was usually red.

  “Hey, Rudolph, what’s up with your nose?”

  “That’s funny. Really.”

  My father swore he had a plan, and was frequently sawing and hammering on weekends, but there were still staircases with no stairs. And rooms full of half-finished inventions. The Solar Fridge kept things warm. The Talking Showerhead didn’t talk. When you said “Hot!” a cold drizzle came out. When you said “Off!” scalding water coated your back. The Talking Shaving Cream was mute, and the Talking Toilet Roll was always empty. So, really, “house” might be the wrong word as well. More like “maze.” Or “trap.” It wasn’t until I was thirteen I stopped getting lost.

  FIVE THINGS THE HOUSE I LIVE IN SORT OF LOOKS LIKE:

  1. A big pile of crap

  2. Driftwood after a forty-foot wave

  3. Where an extended family of orange-wig clowns practice their routines

  4. The nest of Bob the Enormous Irradiated Gopher

  5. The most embarrassing house in Pennsylvania

  I disabled the “alarm,” which meant taking a string off a nail; the string stretched at ankle-height across the doorstep and tied to a bunch of pots and pans. Strictly low-tech. No pin number needed. I felt my way along the wall and then crept up a staircase I was almost positive led to my sister’s room, and hoped she was still awake.

  Olivia lay in bed, the covers thrown off. She rolled over when I came in the door.

  “Stanny?”

  “Hi, Peanut,” I said, sitting on the edge of the mattress and holding her hand. It was tiny and moist. She’d turned six two weeks ago. There were still birthday cards and banners and wrapping paper strewn about the room. I tended to call her dumb nicknames, like Peanut or Pumpkin or Big O. With anyone else it would be stupid, but with Olivia, it didn’t matter if I was stupid.

  “Where’s Chopper?” she asked.

  “Right here.”

  I put my foot on our ancient bulldog, rubbing his belly with my toes. He grunted with pleasure. And then farted. Social graces were not his strong suit. At this point, neither was running or chewing. He was half-blind and had two ridiculous snaggleteeth sticking out of his lower jaw, but Olivia was crazy about him. When I was little, he used to sleep next to my bed, but somewhere along the line he changed allegiances.

  “Chop-chop,” Olivia said, and then reached down and yanked his ear, which he accepted stoically. Olivia could do just about anything and it was okay with Chopper.

  FIVE THINGS CHOPPER SMELLED LIKE:

  1. Old hamburger breath

  2. Old mozzarella

  3. Old grandmother feet

  4. Old turkey loaf

  5. Brand-new sweaty dog-butt

  “I’m glad you’re here, too,” Olivia whispered, sitting up and throwing her arms around my neck.

  Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking: Stan’s been reading Catcher in the Rye. Hey, it’s not my fault there are two people in the world who are hopeless and also love their little sisters. Besides, that’s a book. This is life. In fact, sitting there, I was again reminded that Olivia was the only thing, the only evidence, the only compelling argument I could make, just by her sheer existence, that the world wasn’t, in reality, a massive and useless pile of crap. So Holden can go screw.

  “Are we still going to feed the birds tomorrow?”

  I’d promised to take her to the lake. Olivia liked to sit on the benches, where we’d tear hunks off an unsold loaf of my mother’s organic seventeen-grain spelt bread, and watch with amazement as the birds actually ate it.

  “We sure are.”

  “You promised,” she said, ready for me to back out and disappoint her. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed like I did that a lot. Life kept getting in the way of being the person I was supposed to be.

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “Now go to sleep.”

  “But I’m not tired.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  I laid her down and scratched her back while she squirmed, then waited until her breathing became steady. As I tiptoed to the door, Chopper gave me a parting blast, a solid B-flat.

  “Classy,” I told him.

  He raised an eyebrow and then rolled over and went back to sleep. I considered opening a window, but the percentages were against it. It might open sideways. It might open to a pile of bricks. It might open to an alternate universe where Chopper lay in bed in his jammies and Olivia was curled up on the floor with a ham bone in her paws.

  I felt along the hallway, which narrowed and sloped downward, coming to a dead end, then retraced my steps, took a hard left, bent under a four-foot doorway, and found my room. I sat on the bed, trying to keep my balance. For some reason, it leaned to the left. The floor was level and the legs were all the same length. I’d measured them. Still, it leaned. It defied logic. My father defied logic. He’d also invented Bedsheets-on-a-Roll. There were a dozen sheets above the headboard, perforated like paper towels. Instead of washing your old sheets, you threw them away and just pulled out a new one. Was it environmentally friendly? Probably not. Maybe that’s why I was stuck with the prototype.

  I looked around the room and wondered what to do. There were the same books (either Nietzsche or The Basketball D
iaries) on the shelf, the same records (either the Stones or Pavement) on the floor, the same posters (either Jean Harlow — old school, or Uma Thurman — leather tracksuit) on the wall, and the same smell of sweat-sock there always was.

  Boring.

  I could work on my script. What script?

  I could work on my idea. What idea?

  Anyway, I didn’t feel like it.

  I could go downstairs and talk to my father, except he was probably tinkering in his basement lab. Actually, there was no probably about it. He was definitely down there, inventing see-through earwax.

  I could go downstairs and talk to my mother, except she and Prarash were burning incense and having “book study,” which was supposed to mean discussing Buddhist texts, but really meant eating carob truffles and gossiping about people in town.

  I wondered what Keith was up to, which was dumb, since it was a near mathematical certainty he was lying on a couch gobbling candy and watching some sport, which allowed him to lie in one place for ridiculously long periods of time. It also gave him a reason to yell, loudly and repeatedly, “GO! STOP! TACKLE! HIT!” without his neighbors calling the cops.

  Then the phone rang, which hardly ever happened.

  My mother yelled “Stan? Phone?” which also hardly ever happened.

  I walked down(some)stairs, walked upstairs, took a hard right, ducked under a five-foot doorway, ended up near my father’s “laboratory” (there it was), and then walked to the old plastic receiver in the kitchen. I could hear soldering or the cranking of nuts and bolts. With any luck, the old man was inventing an ATM.

  “Hello?”

  “Yo, Stan-dog.”

  It was Miles, my best friend. (Yes, I have friends. Sort of.)

  “How many times have I told you not to call me ‘Stan-dog,’ Miles? Or, for that matter, attach the word ‘dog’ to anything, ever?”

  “Ha-ha,” he laughed, in his smooth and charming way. “Ha-ha.”

  Miles had a great name. Miles. Like Miles Davis or Miles Away from Home or I Can See for Miles. As a result, he was popular in a sort of goofy way that required no effort or forethought, and no one ever punched him. He wore the clothes he wanted to (odd colors and thrift-store — always clashing) and the hair he wanted to (long and curly and everywhere) and didn’t feel obliged to copy any style. He was always invited to parties, and when he walked in, everyone said “Miles!” and even the blond soccer girls liked him, although he’d had the same girlfriend since second grade, Cari Calloway, and everyone knew, even then, that the two of them would grow up and be married and be smart and funny and wise adults and have a nice house with a library full of rare leather books and a pool shaped like a martini glass. They were also destined to produce any number of painless-labor, bright-eyed, smart and funny and wonderful children who would invariably go to eastern colleges and be on prestigious committees and serve selflessly as volunteers in African republics and wear comfy sweaters and come home regularly to help Dad rake the leaves.