Grasshopper Jungle. Andrew Smith
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“’Cause they smell like my nephew’s feet.”
“Why did you smell a six-year-old kid’s feet?”
“Good question.”
As usual, Shann got mad because I had Robby call her using my phone, and when she answered, she thought it was me. This, quite naturally, made me horny. But Robby explained to her I was writing, and he told her that something terrible had happened to us. He asked if it would be okay that we came over to her new old house as soon as we finished eating.
Robby was such a suave communicator when it came to relaying messages to Shann. In fact, I believed it was the biggest component of why she was so much in love with me. Sometimes, I wished I could cut off Robby’s head and attach it to my body, but there were more than a couple things wrong with that idea: First, uncomfortably enough, it kind of made me horny to think about a hybridized Robby/Austin having sex with Shann; and, second, decapitation was a sensitive topic in Ealing.
Well, anywhere, really. But, in Ealing during the late 1960s there was this weird string of serial murders that went unsolved. And they all involved headlessness.
History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.
So, after we finished eating, I outfitted Robby with some clean socks, a Titus Andronicus T-shirt (I changed into an Animal Collective shirt—all my tees are bands), and gave him my nicest pair of Adidas.
And both of us tried to pretend we didn’t notice my dad’s truck pulling up the drive just as we took off for Shann’s.
“Perfect timing,” I said.
Robby answered by pushing in the dashboard cigarette lighter.
Besides all the head-cutting-off shit that went on fifty years ago, Ealing was also known for Dr. Grady McKeon, founder of McKeon Industries, which, up until about six months ago, employed over half the town’s labor force. Grady McKeon was some kind of scientist, and he made a fortune from defense programs during the Cold War. When the fight against Communism went south on McKeon, the factory retooled and started manufacturing sonic-pulse shower-heads and toothbrushes, which ultimately became far more profitable when made in Malaysia or somewhere like that. So the factory shut down, and that’s also why most of the Ealing strip mall was deserted, and why every time I visited Robby at the Del Vista Arms, there were more and more Pay or Quit notices hanging on doors.
And that’s a half century of an Iowa town’s history in four sentences.
Grady McKeon was gone, but his much younger brother still lived and ran businesses in Ealing. Johnny McKeon owned Tipsy Cricket Liquors and the From Attic to Seller thrift store, both of which were big crowd-pleasers at the strip mall.
Johnny, who was responsible for thinking up the names of those two establishments entirely on his own, was also Shann’s stepfather.
And Shannon Collins, whom Robby and I called Shann, her mother (the relatively brand-new Mrs. McKeon), and Johnny had just taken ownership of the McKeon House, a decrepit old wooden monstrosity that was on the registry of historic homes in Ealing.
Well, actually, it was the only historic home in Ealing.
It took Robby and me two cigarettes to get to Shann’s new old house.
It had already been a rough day.
We were going to need another pack.
GOING SOMEWHERE YOU SHOULDN’T GO
SHANNON KISSED ME on the lips at the door of her new old house.
She kissed Robby on the lips, too.
Shann always kissed Robby on the mouth after she kissed me.
It made me horny.
I wondered what she would say if I asked her to have a threesome with us in her new old, unfurnished bedroom.
I knew what Robby would say.
Duh.
I wondered if it made me homosexual to even think about having a threesome with Robby and Shann. And I hated knowing that it would be easier for me to ask Robby to do it than to ask my own girlfriend.
I felt myself turning red and starting to sweat uncomfortably in my Animal Collective shirt.
And I realized that for a good three and a half minutes, I stood there at the doorway to a big empty house that smelled like old people’s skin, thinking about three-ways involving my friends.
So I wondered if that meant I was gay.
I hadn’t been listening to anything Shann and Robby were talking about, and while I was pondering my sexuality, they were probably thinking about how I was an idiot.
I might just as well have been a blowup doll.
These are the things I don’t write down in the history books, but probably should.
I don’t think any historians ever wrote shit like that.
“You have to excuse him. He got kneed in the balls.”
“Huh?”
Robby nudged me with his shoulder and said it again, louder, because idiots always understand English when you yell it at them: “YOU HAVE TO EXCUSE HIM. HE GOT KNEED IN THE BALLS.”
Shann put her hand flat on the side of my face, the way that real moms, who don’t take lots of drugs every day, do to little boys they think might be sick. Real moms have sensors or some kind of shit like that in their hands.
Shann’s mom, Mrs. McKeon, was a real mom. She also used to be a nurse, before she married Johnny McKeon.
“Are you okay, Austin?”
“Huh? Yeah. Oh. I’m sorry, Shann. I was kind of tripping out about something.”
Having a three-way in Sweden with Robby and her was what I was tripping out about.
But I didn’t tell her.
Shann’s room was empty.
The entire house was mostly empty, so our footsteps and voices echoed like sound effects in horror films about three kids who are going somewhere they shouldn’t go.
Thinking about things like that definitely did not make me horny.
In fact, just about the only things I noticed in that musty mausoleum of a house were unopened boxes—brand-new ones—containing McKeon Pulse-O-Matic® showerheads and toothbrushes.
“The moving van’s going to be here this afternoon. They just finished at the house,” Shann explained as the three of us stood awkwardly in her empty, echoey room.
Because, in an empty bedroom with creaky old wood floors, it is a natural human response to just stand there and shift your weight from foot to foot, and think about sex.
ROBBY’S VOLCANO
SHANN AND I started going out with each other in seventh grade.
When I think about it, a lot of stuff happened to us that year.
There are nine filled, double-sided-paged volumes of Austin Szerba’s Unexpurgated History of Ealing, Iowa for that year alone.
That year, Eric went into the Marines and left me at home, brotherless, with our dog named Ingrid, a rusty golden retriever with a real dynamo of an excretory tract.
People in Ealing use expressions like real dynamo whenever something moves fast-er than a growing stalk of corn.
It was also the same year Robby’s