Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
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hadn’t bought it. I guess I had lost some of my terroristic spark, I’m ashamed to admit. I blamed the working life.
I was still working the blacktop at the grocery store most days after school, and on Saturdays I worked as a gofer for a lawyer. Her name was Ms. Mikiska and she wore slacks and a vest like an old-time banker. She had short, black hair parted and oiled in a way that made you wish she had a waxed mustache to finish the look. Ms. Mikiska would stand outside her storefront office all day saying hello to the old ladies who still shopped downtown, where the only other businesses were a florist that specialized in funeral arrangements and a couple junk shops that called themselves antique stores. The junk shops picked over the estates of dead people who didn’t have family or who didn’t pay their rent and got their stuff put outside when they died, but Ms. Mikiska would tell the old ladies that this or that cherry wood breakfront or Queen Anne dining room set out there on the sidewalk had belonged to a sweet old lady who “hadn’t managed her estate, bless her heart, so her family will never inherit those lovely heirlooms.” My job was to fetch Ms. Mikiska’s lunch and to stand outside when she took calls or went to the bathroom. She told me to say stuff to the old ladies, but I never did.
It was boring as hell and paid real bad, but I was glad for the work. I wanted to be home as little as possible. That’s because home wasn’t our house anymore; it was an apartment. Dad had moved to the city full-time, so when the county offered to buy our house, Mom sold it. Dad didn’t want us to move, but Mom said he didn’t have a say anymore. Mom said the house was too close to the dump so we were better off. We might feel healthier, she said, but Ruthanne said that was bullshit. Ruthanne said we could still smell the dump so whatever was in the air was still going in our noses. Mom said it was only a matter of time before the county claimed the property anyway. She said it was called imminent domain because it was gonna happen sooner or later. Sooner, probably.
The new apartment was in a complex on the highway that looked like a motel. The doors were on the outside, so when you came out of the apartment everybody else could see you, and people in cars on the highway could see you too, and people inside the Burger Brothers across the way, and some seedy characters slouched on the hoods of cars and drinking from paper bags in the parking lot of the grocery store that closed. One time a guy shouted something at Ruthanne that made her cry, but she was too embarrassed to tell me what it was.
The apartment was nice on the inside, though. The living room and kitchen were like one big room so you could be sitting on the couch and talking to somebody while they washed dishes or micro-waved pizza pockets. There were only two bedrooms, but Mom gave Ruthanne and me the big one so we had plenty of room, in my estimation, and a big closet that was bigger than the two closets we used to have combined. But Ruthanne didn’t like it. She said there wasn’t any privacy and I took up all the space with my junk and gross body. I told her I would shower more if she and Mom didn’t hog the bathroom so much.
Grandpa would show up from time to time with a load of food, mostly canned, but also boxes of cereal and dehydrated milk. He told Mom to put the food in the storm shelter, but we didn’t have one anymore. He told us the food was for an emergency. What kind of emergency, he never said, and maybe it was the lack of specifics that caused us to eat the food right away, against his instructions. Sometimes the food had labels like MEAT and CHEESE, and that was the best food, believe it or not. The best food at home, I mean. The best food overall was the food at Pansy Gilchrist High School, hands down. At Pansy Gilchrist there were mini pizzas once a week and a hot dog station so you could eat hot dogs every day.
Though the food was tremendous, the ambience at Pansy Gilchrist was lackluster. The cafeteria was noisy and crowded, and I didn’t know anybody in my lunch period except Demarcus, who had given up on lunch to study in the library. In the cafeteria, the black kids and the white kids sat at different tables, except for the football players, and the football players only sat together on Fridays when they wore their jerseys. The Komer blacks sat apart from the Haislip blacks, and the Haislip whites sat apart from everybody. Sometimes they didn’t sit at all; they just stood around a table with one leg up on chairs so they could lean in and talk in husky voices like they were hashing a conspiracy. They seemed to take pride in being the poorest guys around and living in the shittiest trailers and having the worst looking cars but with the most powerful engines, with trunks full of guns and warm cases of the worst canned beer imaginable. Naturally I was curious about them.
Ruthanne told me they were secret Nazis who wrote a book about killing women and blacks and Mexicans, but I didn’t believe her. First off, they didn’t seem like literary types. I knew from Bob Bilger’s introduction to The Highest Mountain that writing a book was a serious endeavor, a mental exercise akin to the physical exercise required to be in tiptop shape for mountaineering. Second, those boys were too poor to have computers at home. Trailers don’t have computers, as a rule, or flat-screen TVs or fancy stereos, which is why nobody breaks into them like they do houses. Our old house got broken into five times before we moved. It got to where Mom said we should move into a trailer just for security.
Besides, what did Ruthanne know? She was a senior and spent so little time at school that she didn’t even visit her locker. She had to use a rolling suitcase for her bags, because of her spine, so she figured she’d just leave the books in there and save herself the ridicule of standing around the hallways. I kind of envied her.
Classes were by grade but between classes, walking through the hallways, everybody was mixed. I was short and skinny so sometimes I wore two t-shirts to look thicker. It made me hot but gave me confidence. One time I was crouched in front of my locker, which was on the bottom row, and a guy pushed me into it with his foot. He didn’t try to shut me inside or anything, but still it was pretty shitty.
I tried to keep a low profile, especially in class. The trick to not getting called on was to sit up real straight, like I was paying attention, but to stare at the chalkboard instead of the teacher, which is counterintuitive, I know, but if you look into a person’s eyes then the person feels like they know you, so it’s easy to talk to you. I didn’t want to be easy to talk to. I wanted to be hard but polite, sort of like the actor Rick Zorn. In Sudden Kill (or maybe it’s Out for a Murder?) these guys come up to Zorn in an alley and he’s like, “May I help you?” and they’re like, “Yeah, old man, you can help us to your motherfucking wallet.” Zorn raises his hands real cool, but you can tell he thinks these guys are jokers. He reaches for his wallet and you think he’s gonna pull out a gun or something but he does pull out his wallet. Then, just as he’s handing it to a guy, he flicks his wrist and a Chinese star comes out and goes right into the guy’s crotch area. The other guys start running, but Zorn gets one of them in the butt with another Chinese star.
When I got bored staring straight at the chalkboard, I did drawings: a man using another for a puppet by reaching through his butt, a cowboy with his penis on a conveyor belt being cut into coins like a sausage, etc. I sat in back so nobody saw the drawings except me, but one day Mrs. Bianculli came up behind me without me knowing and shrieked. I was drawing a fat man being quartered by four cholos on dirt bikes. His guts were stretched out like a cat’s cradle. It was a pretty good drawing, but Mrs. Bianculli sent me to the principal’s office. The moment of exit was awful. Everybody was staring at me. If my goal was to keep a low profile, this was the opposite.
I hadn’t ever been sent to the principal’s office at Pansy Gilchrist, but I was familiar with the routine from my many visits to Principal Chalmers’s office back at Milford Perkins.
I sat in the waiting room between two older boys and kept my mouth shut. There was a sort of secretary across from us who would peek at us from over a counter, like she was making sure none of us made a break for it. There was a window we could have leapt through in a pinch. There was a framed poster behind her of a big black gorilla face and the word EXCELLENCE. At the bottom it said, “Excellence is not an achievement but a never-ending spirit.”
Eventually a girl came out of the Principal’s office with her head hanging, and the boy next to me went in grumbling. He wore big droopy jeans and had tattoos on his arms. He was a grown man, pretty much. So when he came out minutes later looking like he was coming out of church, I got nervous. It was my turn.
The principal, Principal Winthrope,