49 MIX TAPES
Jeff Tompkins
Copyright © 2011 by Jeff Tompkins
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Cover art by Chris Kemple
templeofkemple.blogspot.com
redvengeance.com
This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is
entirely coincidental.
Paperback and ebook editions: December 2011
ISBN-13: 978-1467981286
ISBN-10: 1467981281
~~~~~
Also by Jeff Tompkins
CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE
(a collection of alleged humor writing)
paperback and ebook
~~~~~
Part One
The only out-of-body experience I ever had was the first time I kissed Abby Carlisle. Which sucks. I went through a lot to get to that moment, so I wish I would have been there.
SEPTEMBER 1985
My Walkman played “Just What I Needed” by The Cars as I waited alone at the end of my street, sitting on the curb and drumming my fingers on my knee, trying to keep time with the music. The only things in my book bag were a few pens, a new notebook, and an older notebook that contained things I had written, but never let anyone see.
As the song faded out, the music was replaced by the deep whirr of a large engine. I looked up and saw the school bus rolling toward me.
I climbed the steps and made my way past several scowling faces belonging to boys who were trying to look tough, but their squinting eyes could have just as easily indicated vision or bowel problems. Maybe both.
Some of the girls’ heads were crowned with dense walls of bangs, so heavily sprayed as to thwart any force of nature. We called them “fence-heads.” Other girls had their bangs cut shorter, teased out, otherwise known as “rooster bangs.”
The bus smelled of motor oil, cigarette smoke, and too much perfume.
My first introduction to the world of high school.
My older sister Cara got to ride to school in her friend Janelle’s car, a perk of being an upperclassman. I’d much rather have ridden with Janelle, not only because it would have decreased my dork factor, but also because Janelle was hot. I’m sure if I’d ever dared to get within three feet of her, though, she would have punched me in the mouth.
The only thing that made riding the bus tolerable was the presence of Abby. She had put her backpack on the seat, ensuring that I’d be able to sit with someone I knew.
I turned off my Walkman and said, “Thanks.”
“Nice shoes,” Abby said. “They almost blinded me when I saw them.”
I knew she would have some crack about them. I got a new pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers two weeks before school started but I hadn’t worn them until that morning. Abby had spent much of the last two weeks telling me I should wear them around, break them in a little, so the white parts wouldn’t be so white, and they wouldn’t look so new. She said it was uncool to have bright new shoes.
“You know,” I said, as the bus rounded a corner out of our neighborhood, “I think you’re actually jealous of my shiny shoes.”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “You know,” she said, mocking me, “I think you’re wrong. As usual.”
That was mostly all we said on the bus, except for Abby asking me if I thought her hair was too short. I told her it wasn’t, and that it looked good, even though I really did think it would look better when it grew out a little more. She had sandy-blonde hair and always wore it just past her shoulders. When it was longer, she’d sometimes wear it in a ponytail on the side of her head, secured with neon-colored elastic bands. The reason I thought her hair looked better a little longer was because she had a slight bounce in her step, and I liked the way her hair moved when she walked.
Abby usually tried to copy one of Belinda Carlisle’s hairstyles, making her look even more like she could be the singer’s little sister than she already did. The Go-Go’s were her favorite band, and not just because of her last name.
~~~
We had been to J. H. Wilden High about a week earlier for orientation, but it looked different as we approached and the building came into view that morning. It was bigger than I remembered, and I had never seen so many people around it.
When we got off the bus, Abby said, “Hey, Will?”
“Yeah?”
She looked around. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Pretty sure.”
She looked over her shoulder and then back at me. “Okay, well, I’ll see you later, I guess.” She started to walk away.
“Wait,” I said. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot.” She turned and disappeared into the crowd.
I had a feeling Abby had no idea where she was going and didn’t want to admit it. But I understood. I had just done the same thing.
~~~
I spotted several people in the hallways who looked as confused and overwhelmed as I felt. The experience was far from how I’d imagined it would be, based on movies I’d seen: walking the halls, looking confident, with a cool song playing in the background.
As the summer days disappeared and the school year drew closer, there were times when I let myself feel like somebody important, maybe even a big shot, because I was getting older and moving on to a bigger school, one step closer to adulthood. After that first morning on campus, that feeling never came back.
~~~
By pure luck, I managed to find Abby in the cafeteria at lunchtime. We sat together and ate greasy rectangles of pizza and drank chocolate milk.
“You like it so far?” I asked her.
“It’s okay.”
I managed to swallow a bite of pizza. “This sucks.”
“I know,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to be in middle school anymore.”
“No, I mean this pizza.”
“Oh. I wouldn’t even call it pizza.” She dropped hers on the plate. “I can’t believe we don’t have a single class together. I don’t even have one with Catherine,” she said, referring to her best girl friend.
I said, “We should have picked the same foreign language. Increase our chances.”
I had picked French, while Abby had chosen Spanish.
“I’m never going to speak Spanish,” she said.
“How do you know?”
She gave me a look I had seen hundreds of times since we’d known each other. Her mouth would be half-open, she’d drop her head a little, and look at me from the tops of her eyes. It was a look that said Don’t be an idiot, or sometimes No duh. This time it meant I was an idiot.
“Because I’m never going to Spain,” she said.
“They speak it in Mexico, too.”
“I’m not going there, either. And you’re not going to France. Where else do they speak French?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Then yours is a bigger waste of time than mine.” She laughed and sipped from her miniature milk carton.
“Becky Daniels is in my math class,” I said, dabbing the pizza grease with a paper napkin.
She made a noise like uugghh and said, “That settles it. Your day is worse than mine.”
~~~
My English teacher, Mr. Shaw, was about my dad’s age, with longish hair sprouting from under a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap. I’d never seen a teacher wearing a hat in class, and it made me think there was something different about him, something that separated him from the other teachers.
His classroom was wallpapered with music posters—Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, The Doors, John Lennon, and some I didn’t recognize—his own personal tribute to the music of his youth.
Mr. Shaw said we’d be reading lots of books in his class, and anyone who didn’t like to read would change their mind by the end of the year.
“I’m going to show you entire new worlds,” he said. “People and places you’d otherwise never know existed.”
That sounded promising, but the skeptic in me thought he was probably overselling the class.
He sat on the edge of his desk, his legs swinging back and forth as he looked around at our young faces. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words.” He paused and a slight smile appeared on his face, then a frown. “Bullsh…” His booming voice faded as he stopped himself from cussing. “Nothing is as valuable as words.”
I can’t say for sure whether the almost-cussing thing was genuine, or whether it was part of an act meant to get our attention, but it seemed real.
He talked about the books we’d be reading throughout the year, and told us we’d also be doing a lot of writing, an announcement that was met with audible groaning from most of my classmates.
I thought about that private notebook in my book bag and wondered if anything I’d written in it would be useful in his class.
~~~
Abby’s stop was just two streets away from mine, but she got off the bus with me at the end of my street. Her parents worked during the day, as did my father, and my mom worked all kinds of odd hours as a nurse. We were “latchkey kids,” so we had absolute, unsupervised control over our lives, at least until around 6 p.m.
We spent the afternoon listening to music, at one point singing along to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” Abby was the only person I’d ever sing around, so I was glad nobody came home while we were performing. It broke the tension of the day for a little while, and then we got back to complaining about having homework on the first day of school.
My mom came in the door just as Abby was leaving and asked if she’d like to stay for dinner.
“No, thanks. My parents are probably going to kill me already.”
“Okay. Well, good luck with that,” Mom said, as Abby made her way down the sidewalk.
While Mom was heating up leftovers in the microwave, Cara got home. I heard her boyfriend’s absurdly loud car rev up and tear off down the street. His name was Chris, but my dad always referred to him as “that guy” or “that kid.”
Dad drove up just as Chris was pulling away. When he got inside, he said, “I don’t like that kid. You’d think he’d get that car taken care of.” I don’t think my dad realized that some guys made their cars loud on purpose.
At dinner, Mom wanted to know all about our first day of school. Mostly mine, seeing as how it was all new to me. “Did you two see each other during the day?”
I looked at Cara and said, “No.”
“Well,” Mom said, “I told Cara to look out for you. You have a problem, try to find her.”
Cara remained silent.
Dad, who had been shoveling food in his mouth, finally spoke. “Jesus Christ, Donna, he can handle himself.”
“Ken, just eat your potatoes,” Mom said. She looked at my sister and me. “You two have to stick together out in the world.”
~~~
When I wasn’t spending time with Abby, I was usually with my friends Doug and Scott. I’d known Doug longer, and met Scott through him.
When Doug and I were eleven, we played on the same city league baseball team. Doug’s strength was running, but he couldn’t catch a ball if you tossed it to him underhand from three feet away. My contribution to the team was the ability to get a critical strikeout right when it mattered—unfortunately it was as a batter and not as a pitcher. The coach put us both in the outfield because most kids couldn’t hit the ball that far, but one day a groundball rolled past Doug out in right field and got stuck in the fence. I ran over to help him and after he threw the ball back to the infield, we had a quick discussion, jumped the fence and went home, never to return to the game. It was the best thing for everyone. We sucked and we knew it.
Doug and Scott were not brothers, but acted like they were. Doug’s role was that of the older brother, so Scott endured more than his fair share of good-natured teasing. But there were times—I witnessed a couple of them—when Scott benefitted from Doug’s protection, mostly when Doug was sticking up for him if someone ragged on him a little too long about his acne. We were all good friends, but those two had a stronger bond for some reason.
~~~
On the third Saturday after freshman year started, we were hanging out in the woods behind Doug’s house, eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke. There was a rumor that your stomach would explode if you ingested them at the same time. We had tested it many times and concluded it was either a myth or we were doing it wrong, and someday one of us would accidentally find the right mixture.
Doug had a package of fireworks, and he’d snatched a pack of his dad’s matches. We were bored, so we invented a game called “Bottle Rocket Roulette.”
The rules were pretty simple: You light the fuse, throw the bottle rocket end-over-end as high as you can, and hope that when it ignites, it’s pointed toward someone other than you.
The first time Doug tried to light one of the matches, it flared up and he dropped it.
“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” Scott said.
A few minutes later, they got into an argument about whether fireworks would be helpful in fighting off the Russians. Doug won the argument by noting that the guys in Red Dawn had actual weapons and still didn’t do so well.
Doug talked a lot about the possibility of nuclear war with the Russians. I think everyone was terrified of it, but Doug brought it up more than anyone I knew.
A Soviet attack was the least of our worries that day, though, as we ran out of the woods, looking back every few steps to see the trees going up in flames, an unintended consequence of our game. We didn’t know which one of us was guilty, but we figured it probably didn’t matter.
I had begun the day as a relatively innocent fourteen-year-old, and ended it as a potential arsonist.
~~~
“You started a fire?” Abby yelled.
“Not me. At least, I don’t think it was me.”
“Why would anyone do that with bottle rockets in the first place?” Abby said. “It sounds stupid.”
“I guess it was.”
It was late that Saturday night, and she called me after her parents went to sleep. Abby’s phone privileges were severely limited, and her father monitored the activity with Orwellian watchfulness.
“Do you think it will be on the news?” she said.
I hadn’t even thought about that. “I hope not.”
“I wish I could have seen it.”
“It was pretty big,” I said. “A few trees were completely on fire. Flames were shooting up into the sky.” I told her the rest of the story and then asked what she’d done all day.
“Had to help my mom clean,” she said.
“Sounds like a ton of fun.”
“I got my allowance, then I talked her into taking me to the mall. What’s that noise?” she said.
“What, this?” I rattled the box again. “Mac and cheese.”
“Since when do you cook, Chef Boyardee?”
I said, “Good one. I’ve cooked before. I’ve even cooked this exact thing for you a few times.”
“Oh, that’s right. Bring me some.”
“I’m not walking all the way over there and having your dad bust me while I’m standing in your yard with a bowl of macaroni and cheese.”
“He’s asleep,” she said. “They both are. I told you that.”
“I’m still not bringing it.”
She laughed and said, “I’m just kidding.”
The truth was that I would have brought some to her. I would bring Abby pretty much anything if she asked. I don’t think she knew that, though.
“What did you get at the mall?” I said.
“Remember that song we heard on the radio, ‘Be Near Me’ by ABC?”
“Yeah.”
“I like that song, and I was going to get their tape, but I wasn’t sure about the rest of it.”
“So, what did you get?”
“The new Thompson Twins. ‘Here’s To Future Days.’”
“Cool. Any good?” I said.
“It’s pretty good. There’s a really cool one called ‘Lay Your Hands on Me.’ I’ll bring the tape to you.”
When a girl tells a fourteen-year-old boy she wants him to hear a song called ‘Lay Your Hands on Me,’ all kinds of things run through his mind, and he’s likely to be rendered speechless. But I managed a few words. “Will you bring it now?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll bring it to school on Monday. Not now.”
“If you bring it now, you can have some mac and cheese.”
~~~
I’d been writing for a couple of years, mostly short stories that were usually based on things that happened to me, but heavily fictionalized and with better endings than the real-life ones. I aimed for two things: writing the outcome I would have wanted in reality, and, wherever possible, a humorous touch to the story.
I’d recently started noticing that writing was making me look at everything differently, like I was trying to see if there were alternative ways of thinking about people, places, events…pretty much the whole world as I knew it.
Sometimes I would page through my notebooks, not really reading, just looking at the words. As long as I can remember I’ve always thought there was something magical, maybe even sacred, about words on a page, and here I was doing it myself. Those times when I’d flip through the pages, I guess I was looking to see if I had created any magic at all, but I’d begun to believe that a writer can’t see that in their own work. At least, that was my rationale for not finding the magic in my notebook.
I never showed my stories to anyone, never even told people I was writing at all. I guarded my notebooks as though my life depended on it, and I’d begun to take my writing so seriously that sometimes I thought it actually might.
The day after the fire, I started writing a short story based on the incident in the woods. I wrote for over an hour, scratching out line after line, changing details and actions and characters, only to find that it was trickier than I thought to be funny about teenage delinquents starting a massive fire in a densely populated residential area.
When I was trying to come up with a name for the story, I kept thinking of the band After the Fire, and at one point their song “Der Kommissar” came on the radio, freaking me out a little.
It was good writing practice—I eventually got the story I wanted—and it was an excellent way to pass a Sunday, my least favorite day of the week. I considered weekends to be only a day and a half long. Half of Friday we were at school, and all of Sunday was spent dreading the upcoming week.
~~~
The next Saturday, I was over at Doug’s again. We didn’t go into the woods, but we stood on his deck and looked at the charred remains and figured we were in the clear because no one had asked us about it.
When Scott showed up, we watched a few hours of Live Aid. Doug had spent that whole day back in July recording the concert on multiple VHS tapes, but he hadn’t labeled them or written down who performed when, and none of us remembered, so it was sort of like watching it live all over again.
Scott said, “I don’t think Phil Collins really flew across the ocean.”
“You saw it happen,” Doug said.
“Yeah, on TV,” Scott said. “It could have been trick photography, or an impersonator or something.”
Phil Collins had played Wembley Stadium in London earlier in the day, then flew across the Atlantic in a Concorde to play the concert’s other site, JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. This was the first time I had heard anyone suggest it was some kind of conspiracy.
I said, “You think they faked it?”
“They could have.”
“So they got a Phil Collins impersonator at one of the shows?” I said.
“It’s possible,” Scott said.
“No,” Doug said. “No, it’s really not.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked.
“To show the Russians. Just like getting to the moon before they did.”
I said, “So we’re using Phil Collins to show the Russians we can fly across the ocean? I think they already know that.”
Scott looked at the TV for several seconds, then back at us. “Guys, I’m just kidding. Jeez.”
We knew he wasn’t. Scott often said things without thinking first. He was careless, the kind of guy who might drive a convertible through a carwash without putting the top up. He was also the most impulsive person I’d ever known. The first time we met, he ate a piece of dog food on a dare, but had failed to negotiate a reward in advance. Despite my young age, the irony wasn’t lost on me: Even a dog knows ahead of time what it’s going to get for doing a trick.
Scott dropped the Phil Collins conspiracy talk and changed the subject to his new parachute pants. I no longer wore the ones I had, and I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Doug wearing his. I think we realized around the same time that we looked like dweebs in them.
But Scott still sported them as though they were the new thing. He played with one of the zippers too much and it got jammed. While trying to fix it, he said, “Did you guys tell anyone about the fire?”
Doug said, “No.”
“Just Abby,” I said.
“What is it with you two anyway?” Doug said.
“Nothing. We’re friends.”
Scott looked at Doug. “Do we believe him?”
Doug shook his head. “No, we don’t.”
~~~
Despite what those guys thought, it was true: Abby and I were just friends. But not by my choosing.
We’d known each other since we were six years old, when her family moved to a house a few blocks away and our parents became friends. That’s the way it was for the first few years anyway. For some reason unknown to me at the time, Abby’s parents had stopped being social.
It was fine with me. Her father was an intimidating man with a loud voice, and he had a remarkable knack for making people feel unworthy of being anywhere near his family, especially his daughter and only child.
Abby and I had a pretend marriage when we were eight, but she didn’t know about it. Sometimes, especially when we were watching TV, I’d secretly imagine that we were husband and wife. The make-believe matrimony wasn’t all that different from imagining that I was a cowboy or an airplane pilot, but I’d moved beyond that level of fantasy.
Even in elementary and middle school, my primary concern in life was what Abby Carlisle thought of me. I started spending a few extra minutes in front of the mirror every morning, trying in vain to find a way to get my cowlick to stay down.
When we were out on the playground and there were lots of other boys around, I always made a point of trying to run faster than the other guys. I’d zip back and forth in front of Abby and her friends, totally convinced it would make me more attractive. I’m not sure how I got the idea. It just sort of came to me, I guess. It was something natural, animalistic, an instinct. Maybe I got it from watching reruns of Wild Kingdom, where the male lions would fight to the death over one of the females. Trust me, if I thought growing a thick, lustrous mane would have impressed Abby, I would have found a way to grow one.
Displays of my physical prowess didn’t work, though, so when we were nine we had a pretend divorce. She of course didn’t know about that, either, and since it was my fantasy and I was the writer-director, it was an amicable split, and she got none of my stuff.
On the last day of sixth grade, I gave her a note that said: “Do you like me?” There were two boxes; one marked “yes,” the other “no.”
She checked “yes,” and added, “We’re soul friends.”
Soul friends? I’d never heard that before, and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it probably wasn’t as good as being soul mates. It was my first attempt at trying to figure out the female mind—a futile endeavor, because I barely knew how my own worked.
Near the end of eighth grade, we had a graduation dance. Nobody really had dates; you just sort of showed up with your friends.
My mom drove Abby and me to the dance, and when we got to her house, I saw her in her dress, and her hair was styled like I’d never seen it before. There had been times over the last year or so that I’d noticed Abby changing, starting to look more like a grown-up girl, but this was a huge leap forward.
Just before eight o’clock, the principal took to the microphone and said that we were going to have the first slow dance of the night, and we were going to do something a little different.
The guys had to draw names out of a box and dance with the girl we picked. Doug said it was so the ugly girls wouldn’t feel left out.
Reaching into the box, I was thinking: Let it be Abby, let it be Abby…
The DJ, who was actually just one of the teachers, played “Almost Paradise” from the Footloose soundtrack.
A few teachers roamed the dance floor, making sure we weren’t standing too close to our partners, which wasn’t a problem for me because I got matched up with Sarah Goddard, who had unusually hairy arms and a sweaty back.
The slow dance wasn’t even close to being “almost paradise,” somewhat because of Sarah, but mostly because I caught a few glimpses of Abby dancing with Robby Stanton.
The principal got on the mic again just before nine o’clock and said, “Our last dance of the night will be another slow dance. This time you get to pick your partner!”
I looked around for Abby but didn’t see her right away. She was already out on the dance floor with Robby again.
When I saw Sweaty Sarah coming toward me, I bolted for the bathroom and stayed in there until the song was at least half over.
Waiting outside for Abby’s mom to pick us up, I said, “I looked for you for the last dance.”
“You did?”
I nodded.
“Why?” she said. “We’re friends. Friends don’t slow dance.”