We Say Cool Things to Each Other
As far back as I can remember, it was dark here in Florida. For years and years, I sat next to the 60-Watt light bulbs on the corner of the living room couch. Staring into the TV screen. The people inside the TV screen shot little beams of invisible light out at me, for their own amusement. Somehow, Tom figured out how to move within the flow of the beams, and he eats the pictures on his family’s color TV for breakfast every morning. Tom Wheatly’s family understands more about Televisionland than they do about Florida, since they’ve only lived in the Sunshine State for a few months. Lockport New York might as well be on the backside of the moon compared to Pinellas Park, Florida. Somehow, the Wheatly family managed to wind up here, and Tom showed up and saved my life. You see, Tom understands how to slip in between the cracks and land in the exact spot between Televisionland and Florida. It’s not like Tom and I think the same stuff all the time. In fact, we don’t. And it’s the interesting differences that makes people say cool things to each other. At night, while I’m trying to sleep around the corner from the TV, it makes weird deep under the ocean sounds. It gurgles and bubbles like a witch’s cauldron. The tube wants my gray matter like an insatiable aquatic demon wants wooden sailing ships. Advertising, repression, propaganda, meaningless social conformity, it all flashes in front of my eyes.
Tom Wheatly is a foot taller than anyone else at school (including teachers) and has big, always wide-open brown eyes covered up half the time by his habit of pushing his Horn-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. He wears bright paisley shirts and shirts with wiggly stripes before anyone else at school. And he has one pair of floppy wide-cord bell-bottoms he keeps dying deeper and deeper shades of purple, until they’re black as midnight. Tom is phenomenal at screaming at his top vocal capacity in public restrooms and then walking out casually and blaming an invisible person in the empty stall, jumping two feet up in the air if anyone so much as mentions snakes, and saying the exact wrong thing at precisely the wrong time by instinctively knowing who’ll cringe in their shorts at that sort of behavior.
A few weeks after we go shoplifting at Woolworths, the two of us are heading over to his house on a Friday evening. Walking at a fast clip on cracked concrete sidewalks, there are large spaces reserved in our brains for a single pulsing thought: There’s no school tomorrow. Our breath comes out in solid shapes of air, a rare occurrence in Central Florida. I’m wearing a thrift store Navy P-Coat over a well-worn black sweatshirt, and Tom’s got on his Forest Green wool coat that reaches down almost to his knees. I feel the cold night spreading its invisible fingers around the blue TV light and lamp-lit houses we pass by.
As we’re outside Tom’s door, he says, “I’m just going to grab a different shirt. We’re not staying long.”
Inside, Tom pulls off his coat and tosses it on a chair by the door, saying to his two brothers, “This is a new friend of mine from school, so don’t act like assholes.”
It was clear from their expressions Tom’s words were beyond meaningless to their ears. They long ago perfected the kid-mind technique of systematically blocking out entire segments of communication issuing forth from an older brother’s vocal cords.
Harry, the next to youngest to Tom, is almost Tom’s height but is as wide as a double-door refrigerator.
All Harry wants to do is try on my wire-frame glasses. I keep saying, “No, I don’t think so.”
Tom’s youngest brother, Victor, wearing only a pair of white Fruit of the Loom underwear pulled up almost to his belly button, is leaning his head into the oven in the cramped rental’s kitchen, salting a pan of frozen French fries. Tom goes over and turns up The Brady Bunch on the TV, then begins sorting and flinging shirts piled on the couch, until he finds a wiggly-striped shirt that’s close enough to clean.
Satisfied with the progress of the fries in the oven, Victor decides it’s an opportune time to push up against Harry’s chest by hurling himself at Harry and flapping his arms. Harry looks at his younger brother like one glances at a mosquito before extinguishing it’s life. Emitting a single grunt, Harry picks Victor up by the neck and tosses him over the back of the couch. Victor laughs as he sails through the air, then wails when he bounces his head against the wall.
I turn to Tom. “Is this what usually happens around here?”
“Hah! Unfortunately, yes. Now you can understand why I need to get away, besides, I like talking with you. We say cool things to each other.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And mostly without interruption.”
Tom, finishes buttoning his shirt, reaches down to check for any blood on Victor, while saying loudly enough for both brothers to hear, “What did I say?”
In unison, Harry and Victor say, “Don’t be assholes!”
While not remotely reflecting the current state of things in the Wheatly residence, there’s a moment of calm, when the family members of The Brady Bunch take over the conversation, Tom yells at Harry, “Where’s mom?”
Harry is now planted on the end of the couch, intimately involved with a turkey sandwich. In between gulps of the sandwich, he babbles out a reply concerning their mother’s whereabouts. She went to Winn Dixie in a spaceship, she’s gone to pay a parking ticket and is in the back of a taxi driven by a giraffe, but in all truthfulness she just needed a break and is smoking in their car at the end of the street.
To which Tom replies, “OK, don’t break anything or kill each other. See you in a few hours.”
“What’ll I tell mom or dad if they ask where you went?” Harry shouts as we head out the door.
Over his shoulder, Tom says, “Just clean up a little before they get home, Dickhead!”
Harry yells something else at us, but we quickly recede from his vocal range. We walk a few blocks through the winding backstreets, and I realize I don’t even know where we’re going. Does it matter? Not a bit.
Where we wind up is Charlie Wright’s house. He was standing next to Tom when I went up and asked Tom if he stole records. Charley is soft and has long eyelashes, and a high-pitched giggle as a response to most things. I didn’t know or care what any of this meant. I haven’t been exposed to that type of thinking.
“Hi Tom, so good to see you,” Charlie says while he opens the door. “Nice shirt!”
We’ve gone from prehistoric mud-man creatures to manners and compliments in just under a few blocks.
“Hiya Charley, this is my friend Alex, you saw him a few weeks ago when we met.”
“Hey, Charlie,” I say as we step into an absolutely silent living room. “Anyone here besides you?”
“No, there isn’t!” he says, and breathlessly tells us about how thrilled he is that his parents are away for the weekend, and they even took his younger brother (or “bother” as he calls him) along as well. And, do we want to play with his father’s short-wave radio in the garage? Wait a sec, his father also has a large collection of nudist camp magazines hidden in the back of the hall closet. He leads us to the closet first, and flings a dozen or so magazines with photos of nude couples letting things breathe free in the great outdoors on the cover of each magazine, onto the blue and lime-green couch.
The three of us sprawl on the floor and thumb through the magazines for a while. Usually, if someone shows off their dad’s secreted away magazines, it’s going to be Playboy, and I’d figured out the girls in that magazine were spray painted and made-up to the max, and photographed for one thing only, to get you turned on. But here I am, in comfort of someone’s living room, looking at everyday folks, sitting nakedly at picnic tables, strolling near lakes, playing tennis – male and female nudists in forest retreats, not making a big deal about being their completely naked selves. Tall, short, heavy, skinny, old, young, middle-aged, and all are naked, naked, naked. Lined, creased, untrimmed pubic hair, floppy breasts and tiny boobs, short and long dongs, hairy, smooth, and many of them wore sunglasses. Men with crew cuts and women wearing their long hair flowing down their backs. This was a part of America I’d heard whispered about, but to see photographic proof of people being as socially free as one can possibly be, it was like seeing pictures of real aliens, not fake photos or artist’s sketches.
Next, Charlie leads us to his father’s workshop in the garage, where the short-wave radio is kept. Much bigger than a regular table radio, its easily the most complicated radio I’ve ever seen. Giving off an odd green glow in the dim light of the garage, it’s got a cartoony sci-fi vibe, like a cross between the transporter technology on Star Trek and the Cone of Silence in Get Smart. Charley flips a couple of switches and in between the static and the squeaks, we hear voices chattering in English, Spanish, maybe some Russian, and possibly French. Snippets of words and phrases adrift in an ocean of static. I imagine how far away the disembodied voices are (Cuba, Europe, Russia?), whether they are young or old, and if it’s day or nighttime. When the glowing short-wave radio connecting us to anywhere in the world lost its hold on us, Charlie leads us into the kitchen.
Wearing a wicked grin, Charlie plugs in the popcorn popper on the counter, then pours oil into the bottom of it. As the oil gets hotter, little wisps of smoke curl up from the popper machine.
Tom says, “What’s up?”
Charlie says, “You’ll see.”
Charlie drags a kitchen chair over to the counter, steps up on it, theatrically clears his throat and takes a few kernels out of a popcorn bag next to the popper, and gracefully tosses the kernels into the machine. Seconds later, the kernels pop out from the depths of the machine and land in the sink.
Tom grins an even wickeder grin, and motions for Charley to step aside from the chair. He ascends the kitchen chair, coughs twice, takes aim, and drops about a handful of kernels into the popper.
The three of us hover over the counter and wait for the inevitable to happen. Sure enough, the kernels transform into popcorn, and fly out into the sink and onto the floor.
Next, I pick up a handful, Charley grabs a bunch, and we both throw them in the popper in the same instant.
Within moments, the batch of kernels blasts out of the machine and falls into the sink, onto us, and all over the floor.
We keep it up until all we can do is laugh and point at the kitchen floor, which is now a greasy carpet made of popcorn. Charlie starts jumping back, throwing his hands up in the air, and screaming in mock horror when any of the popped popcorn touches any part of his body.
Tom snatches the bag of kernels, and dumps the rest of them in the popper at point blank range while laughing uncontrollably. Charlie tries to run away, but he turns around a moment too late, and a hailstorm of popcorn, not as a food product known and loved by everyone – but as a killer storm of popcorn bursting forth and raining down from the innocent-looking gray and white kitchen appliance and onto our heads.
Charlie had a weird picture of suburban destruction lodged in his brain, and a carpet of popcorn covering kitchen tiles was the first sign of its existence. Next, as if his actions are guided by remote control, Charlie pulls a loaf of bread off the top of the fridge, puts two slices of toast in the toaster on the counter, and repeatedly shoves them down. Within minutes, billows of smoke rise from the burning toast and invade our nostrils. After the first two slices of toast become charred beyond recognition as anything edible, Charlie removes them with metal tongs and drops them into the sink. He whips two fresh white slices from the bread wrapper and then crams them into the toaster, repeatedly.
Tom laughs convulsively in between coughing fits.
The kitchen has become a bombed-out bunker of random mayhem and stepped on and smushed inedible popcorn; the air in the enclosed space has turned into an angry weather system created by burnt toast and cooking oil.
I envision summer thunderstorms, with clouds dark and dense, rising higher and higher into the sky – full of rumbling thunder and lighting, jolts of electricity connecting sky to earth in a flash – seconds away from releasing a downpour sure to soak you in seconds, lasting no more than forty minutes, and gone as if it never even happened.
As if waking from a dream, I walk to the front door to open it and welcome some air inside the living room. Tom and Charlie stumble out of the kitchen, and fall onto the couches. Laughter and tears continue flowing as the smoke slowly dissipates – making its way outside, a bit of crazy haze winding out into the winter night. I stand in the doorway, taking in the spectacle of what happened. The kitchen looks like pictures I’d seen on TV – the aftermath of a major earthquake, the scene of a horrendous bombing shown on the nightly news, or the side of a wilderness mountain burning out of control.
I join Tom and Charlie flopped on the carpet, next to the couches with nudist camp magazines on top, pleasantly exhausted from smoke, hysteria, and wonderment. How was any of this possible, the letting go, someone’s parents disappeared and completely out of the picture, the longing in each of us to create or partake in utter chaos, which is usually buried deep in the cellar of our minds and somehow it came to the surface for a brief moment, somehow by-passing social rules and releasing pent-up primal needs.
Only scant minutes before, we’d been standing in a sparkly and tidy kitchen near Florida’s Gulf Coast. For a brief moment in the history of our lives, we are caught up in scribbling over someone else’s version of how the world’s supposed to be, and making our own marks on the world, our world, for once.
This is going to be an interesting friendship, I think to myself.
Thanks, Alisa!