Storymania - Falls Street by Scott W. Hazzard

Falls Street (5)
Scott W. Hazzard

“Huh?” I said.
“Your lady,” he said. “Any progress?”
“My lady?” I said. “Oh, yeah, she’s a bitch.” And I don’t know why I said that. I was remembering out loud, I think.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I mean, no. We haven’t talked.”
“Well, are you planning on seeing her somewhere,” he said. “You know, I hear that a bunch of girls are playing field hockey over by the school on the weekends to get ready for next season. She’s bound to be there.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“You have no excuse,” he said. “She’s right there just a block or two away.”
“I know,” I said. It’s amazing how much of the world can fit inside just a few blocks. The furthest reaches can be just minutes away in real time. If you think about where you are and not what your thoughts are on the subject, it really becomes a matter of transportation. “I’m going.”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “Good for you. I’m glad you’ve got something to look forward to… Me, I’ve got this thing coming up in on Monday that….”…and blah, blah, blah.
Nothing really important happened the whole time I was there. I checked over my lists, and they watched me writing in my notebook.
“Mr. Breakdown,” Crash said. “Is that what we’re supposed to call you?”
“I don’t care,” I said. He just let it drop. He probably thought I was trying to be badass or depressing just to get a rise. I could have explained it. I could have had the spotlight for a whole five minute stretch explaining why I was doomed to break down a million times over in the great deluded effort to get laid under the guise of true love, but I let it drop. That spotlight between us was a very dim thing. To fight over it, that meant saying to myself that we were meant to grovel for what little we had. I didn’t want to think that about myself anymore or any of my friends. When Starky piped up about seeing Connie Stults at the grocery store, it felt like getting kicked in the guts.
***

Summer is nothing like Fall. I like the leaves, that scraping sound when the wind tries to pick them up, but can’t and just drags them along the sidewalks and the roads. I like that. Try to find that in a T-shirt. Try to find that in a pair of pants. That Sunday was strange. I set out early in the morning with my notebook and pen. Waiting by the fences at the school, I saw the girls filter in from their cars. Sarah Highroad was wearing light blue shorts and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I wrote down the word “blue” and then it was settled, but I didn’t really watch the blue or think about it. I thought about the white of her thighs and the shape of them. I thought about knowing how her heart must beat to a set rhythm, rattling her chest, being the center of all that life and energy. She was sweating as I imagined she would. And the other girls there were all slicing in on my mind. Sometimes, they were in the way, and other times I got distracted when one would lean over and I could see a bit more of her back underneath her shirt. On the side of the field, Randy Ruth was hanging out with some of his friends. I didn’t want to be seen just standing there looking from outside the fence. Right before I got ready to leave, I saw Jeff on top of the hill. One of those girls was the reason we never saw him at all. I stayed a while longer wondering who she was, wondering how one could stand out any more than the others. Sex is the only place where a man is designed to choose. He knows what he wants. Picking is the easy part. It’s living with the decision that’s torture.
I walked to the opening in the fence, and I slipped underneath the chain. I walked alongside the field, watching her make a run from one end of the field to the other. They were screaming and yelling a lot, and I decided I didn’t like the game. I decided I didn’t like being there, and it was becoming a waste of a very important day. I walked over to soccer field and stood by the penalty box. I kicked the ground to hear the grass snapping and brushing to the air. It was a nice sound, but it lacked the weight of a soccer ball blasting away. I would like soccer, too, but I could never be any good at it. I’m not a fan or a player, really. I’m just someone that can’t be controlled, that fell into a position, and only wants to remain unbeaten, unchanged, and relentless. I played just to send the ball away. I played just to hear the sound of release, the sound of something escaping the surrounding pressure. Where it landed wasn’t about me. I never passed the ball. I didn’t care. I only lifted my head up when it was time to see it sailing away. I was lost in my imagination when it was flying. I was living through the height and the fall of it. But, a person can’t live in imagination, really.
I walked off the field, but I didn’t want to go back through to hear those girls yelling at each other. “Go Krissy!” and “Yeah, Tara!” and “whooo” and “whoopieee” and whatever the hell else. They were feeling like a disease. I ended up walking some more. Then, I realized I had walked to the track. Behind me, I didn’t see anything. In front of me, the track curved back around. I took a seat in the shade for while. That’s when Carrie Ann stepped onto the track from the far side. She set her water bottle down, tied up her hair in a ponytail, and with a quick bounce, she was off into a solid run. She was almost to me by the time I got to my feet. I got out of there before she had to see me. I didn’t see any reason to intrude. I didn’t feel much like running. I wouldn’t know how to begin.
On the way back through the soccer field, I heard the girls shouting and the dull clocking sound of the field hockey sticks hitting the ball. It wasn’t anything I really wanted to remember. It sort of stuck with me, though, and helped me remember Sarah’s moving body. It was something just to feel the summer heat and think that she was sweating more than I was. On the hill, I met Jeff before I went back home.
“Have a drink,” he said passing his flask. It was really hard stuff to even smell.
“Tolerance,” he said. “You’ll get it.”
“Right,” I said.
“People can train themselves into liking whatever’s bad for them,” he said.
“I guess,” I said.
“I think when I die,” he said taking a drink. “I’ll hate it, because it’ll probably be the best thing that ever happened to me, and I won’t know how to deal with that.”
“What do you like,” I asked.
“What?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to know what you like?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Neither have I,” I said. “I’m trying to think about it now.”
“Oh yeah,” he said taking a drink. “I’m not.”
And he didn’t say anything else. He just finished drinking, and when it was gone, he left. He didn’t even stay to watch the girls play. I got home around twelve, and I wasn’t feeling like I had enough energy to write down all the things I’d seen. On my special day, on my designated special day to find stuff, I hadn’t been anywhere that sold anything. I hadn’t seen any looks or haircuts or types of anything. Yet, I felt so damn tired, I just wanted to collapse in my room on the mattress. I had it out in the hallway, though, because I was rebuilding my old bed. I hadn’t finished, yet. The place smelled like soap and Windex. I stayed out in the hallway for a little while, until I heard my mother poking around, and the hum of her voice was coming through everything again. I got up and walked down the stairs. I told her something about going out, and I left to get in the car. Even there, I could hear her humming through the windows and the car doors. And I wondered if she was the reason people felt like they had to buy something all the time. I wondered if most people just couldn’t take it, so they ended up buying things to make it go away. It’s not going to work, but it’s better than doing nothing. When you do nothing, just sort of take it in, you train yourself to like it in some way. You train yourself to believe what you hear before you even hear it. And I don’t like her, really, I don’t think. And I don’t think she likes me anymore, because I broke the repetition. I was a beautiful boy, maybe, but I fucked that up good when I put it all in boxes. When I wiped the flies from the windowsill, it wasn’t just moving the dead. It was realizing them, moving them quickly without service or ceremony. All those purchases, toys that had defined my youth, all those comic book heroes and action figure that define who I was, that was all gone into a cardboard coffin in the leaky basement. Dust would come. Decay would come. The ache of knowing it would come and go, and her hum would always be there. I turned the key and the engine fired up. I went out to make her proud of me the only when I could. I went out into the world to become something stable again. To become something she could know well enough to shop for. And if I didn’t know what to buy, I’d try to find whatever would be easiest for her to understand. It’s the least I could do after all that had happened. I practically killed her son.
***

Chapter 5 - Perfect

Impulse shopping is harder than it sounds. First, you have to have impulses. I suppose everyone has impulses, but when you’re young and personality is a health hazard, you don’t really recognize impulses as anything other than that funny voice or that voice your parents wish wasn’t there. Reaction is the strangest thing. One person may see a crowd with yellow hats and wonder where his yellow hat is. Another may see the same crowd and vow never to wear yellow again. A combination of prejudices become what most would call style. Some people are fashionable, while others are anti-fashion. Your standard fashion princess, let’s say for the fun of it, Sarah Highroad, probably spends a lot of money buying lots of stuff so she can look and smell like quite a nice piece of ass. That’s fine and dandy, because big business gets her cut of the craze, and some dirty old company owner not only gets a wad of cash, he also gets every young girl in America gift wrapped in the summer wear of his design. It’s not a bad racket, I’d say. Of course, it doesn’t end as innocently as that. No way. Let’s not forget that girls, yes, the little Sarah’s in training, too, want to look hot. They want to resemble delicately wrapped delectable candies in a tray. It makes them feel good. Only some fictitious virtuous lug is supposed to notice, while your more complex, but defective model of man is suppose to pretend his dick was cut off in the same accident that gave him a bad complexion or a bad sense of style. That accident is birth. That accidental person learns that he can’t have and has no hope of having like others do. He goes inward, takes with him all the visuals of a world that turns women into commercials for women, and suddenly, he learns he can buy anything he needs. His exclusion then becomes the gain of corporate America. He’s not pro-species. He doesn’t fuck to perpetuate the system. He’s anti-species. His existence is a supplement to the animal urges of his body. He sleeps with magazines and an imaginary woman, because the real ones don’t want anything to do with reality. A large segment of the jilted community is too sick buy, and a larger percentage is too sick not to buy. Lucky for industry, stupid people hope just long enough to breed.
Going to malls, watching the flesh jiggle in various summer prints and packages, you get the sense that anyone with a sliver of intelligence is either missing or dead. And when I say missing, I mean that he’s changed so much that he doesn’t even remember where he came from. Superstars and music video queens started as sluts of all kinds, bottom-feeding at the base of a new world, building a persona from scratch. Someone he or she was might as well have never existed. I’ve dreamed of being missing, being a poster and a milk carton model, but I could never get up the guts. Sometimes, you have to realize that bravery is a byproduct of stupidity. Either you get over your limitation or you just get stupid. I know I can’t run. I know I can’t leave town and try new kind of life. I know my limitations, but if I’m going to get anywhere, I have to build myself as a consumer, a needy, greedy go-getter. And oh yes, this would mean getting seriously stupid.
At the mall, I was feeling like a science fiction space explorer surrounded by these otherworldly creatures. I categorized them. I filed them in my notebook, and I tried writing down what worked and what didn’t. Three types of people existed in that mall. Group one is the fat asses, grimy loser, and general useless filth. There was a time when I’d say that they were my people, but these people are at best delusional. They’ve eaten a dream that I’ve always thought of as ridiculous anyway. When I was in my head thinking about shit, they were eating chips thinking about nothing, flipping channels, and trying to fit as much base sensation into the stillest possible life. They’re waste, and while I do love them…. (so pathetic, it’s endearing)… They are the new enemy. In order to rise above them, I must separate at all costs. I can’t appear to know them or want to, and I have to do this instinctively. I can’t sit up at night and decide that they had their chance. I have to wake up disgusted, almost fearing the existence of them, striving to reach a bright, clean, stylized life that has no room for the fat, the stinky, and the poor. Why? Because this is fucking war. It’s them or me, now. And someday, it’ll be us or them. And later, just us.
I’ve been at this thing all wrong. For so long, I’ve said. It’s us v. them, but it’s not. Nothing brings people together like a third party to hate. They say I hate fat people, and I say, “Sure, why the hell not?” because I really have nothing else better to do with my time. Why sit watching life from on a hill or by a fence when you can come together with the feeling that binds all things. Hatred pulls you in. It makes countries strong. It makes life worth living. Who’s the enemy? Who’s everything I’m not? Don’t we need this to define ourselves? Sure. Group one is the official enemy. And group two, that’s the resistance. They have style and grace. They’re the five percent of the population that makes the clothes everyone else wants look good. And everyone wants in on this segment, right?
Let’s be honest. They’re where the great sex is. Underneath those clothes, the stitching patterns, the fifteen million pockets, the logos, and the names, bodies are in the waiting. No one wants to have sex with group one, except members of group one. Group two is the segment of the population best equip to guide the rest through every trend of the ages. It’s quite exciting. And my first instincts are to puke, but I’ve cast them aside so this little project can continue. You see, group three is made up of those people you see who could be attractive if they’d just make a few changes. Every guy has seen a girl who’d be hot if she only showed a little here or there. Every girl has seen a guy who has a style that’s just a slight bit off, be it a loud shirt or a bad hair day. These people on the fringe or those people who can’t decide and can’t commit to group two status, they don’t have the drive or the guts. And the main thing they don’t have the guts for is hatred. They’re afraid to hate group one. They’re afraid to be disgusted by humanity. They’re immature response to everything is hatred towards all people who express hatred. It’s silly. They hate the trendy, because they know the trendy are direct and decisive. They know what to want and want it bad enough to have it perfect every time.
So, what’s the sense of trying to trick the average group two person into having sex with you? They’re decisive. They know what they want, and only some crippling uncertainty would ever cause them to spread for you. That’s the truth of the matter. So why not rise? Why not hate your inbred cousins? Why not hold your nose at the truck driver in line at the supermarket in town? Hell, refuse to shop there at all. Let the losers collect in the gutters. Why not? Does it make you a bad person? Yeah, probably, but if that doesn’t send you to hell, all that sexual frustration will find other ways to land you in the fire for sure. So, you’re fucked either way. Would you rather find a way to deal with the problem or sit around with crotch scratching white trash watching tracker pulls and waiting for time to be alone so you can barely reach your dick under your lard rolls to wack off to the JC Pennies catalogue? It’s your choice, really? It’s as hard and as simple as that. Hate. That’s the answer. But don’t hate what you really want to be. Hate what you will become. Hate the inevitable. Hate it enough to change your fucking bad fate. Get the hell out of the trailer park. You are a prize. You are some kind of God. You deserve better than this shit. And that’s the attitude that you need. If you don’t want to puke on yourself every time you can fathom staying home on Friday imagining real life and hating those who live it, then you’ll never be anything. You’ll never do anything, but wait.
And I wasn’t ready to talk or stop thinking, but I was ready to buy some stuff. I bought black jeans like the ones I saw some skater kids wearing. When I didn’t see too many people wearing them, I bought some cargo pants. I bought long shirts with names I didn’t know, and I bought the first band T-shirt that matched. I went to the CD store and bought their first and last album. The two albums were actually all they had of them, anyway. I was officially a fan after I read the lyrics sheet. It was nothing special, but I remembered some choice lines in case anybody asked. And I stepped into the hair salon, and pointed to a kid with fucked up orange hair and spikes. I said, “if you can do it” and the lady said, “you forgot to take the tag off your shirt” and I said “you forgot that I need a hair cut, not fashion advise” and she got pissed and it burned in my gut, because I never wanted to piss anybody off, but I realize with all the fat and ugly people, the imperfect wannabe people, and will-never-be people, there’s no use in giving anyone a chance. Be a fucking bastard all day long, the world will never run out of people to be an ass to. Reputation is only a problem for people who think small. The bigger you get, the less everybody knows. That makes you king if you demand anything at all.
I know all these things that I don’t practice, and I say a lot of them just to make me feel better after I know I’ve been thinking and acting like a jerk. This is all just my poor attempt to justify my actions. The fucking sad thing is that my analysis of the situation, my offering of an explanation, shows that I am at least somewhat ashamed. Yeah, I’m on the ball, so any junior psychologists can stuff it. I’m more aware of what I’m doing than you could ever be from reading countless books on the subject of human thought. What I know for sure is that I should not feel shame. I should not feel the desire to explain the thought process or lack thereof behind my hair cut. And that sweaty, filthy biker guy who did my eyebrow, tongue, and lip piercings makes me think I know the purpose of group one. They are to help me feel less ashamed. I make good use of them. That makes their existence meaningful, and thus, I am not discarding them. I’m acknowledging their purpose as different than my own. I let them pass. That’s the way I’ll have to look at it. I can’t look at the shit heads in simple jobs and say, “that could be me, so be nice.” No, I have to say to myself, that’ll never be me. That’s not even my species.
No shame. That’s the goal, and it takes a great act of blindness. It takes a sacrifice. I look in the mirror, though, and I see a character, a thing that is trying to be. It’s still group three. There are obvious problems. The style isn’t stable. My ease is manufactured. I’m just playing dress up. That’s not enough. So what I need is a fashion consultant, someone on the fringe of group two or many people from group three that I can ride all the way up. So, I thought about Ray and all he had done right for himself at the ballpark. I thought about his definite style. He does that hippy thing with the sandals and the swirls of color on his shirts. He’s got the hemp jewelry and all, too. I didn’t want that, and with the hair and the pants, I was really looking more like a standard punk. I watched MTV a lot. I tried to pick a few celebrities that didn’t seem too hard to mimic. I tried to find some of the clothes Scott Weilend wore in Stone Temple Pilots videos. I watch the baseball games when they panned across the crowd and figured that I better get a hat of some kind or a jersey. The prices on those things were unreal, so I said fuck it. Thinking about baseball always pissed me off when I was shopping. Baseball was the hardest thing to like. It cost a shit load for the gear and shit load of time just to get up to speed on the game, the players, the stats, the trades, the politics, and bullshit. I didn’t want to waste my time. I figured it was best to be a punk.
And so the punk scavenger hunt went down for a while. I got some jewelry, a long wallet chain, these metal beads that went around my neck, and some things for my wrists. It was all real ridiculous. It’s one thing to see the stuff. It’s another thing entirely to own it, to own up to it. Once you say, yes, this is a purchase, you’ve said more about yourself than you ever could with words. You’ve given a slice of your potential existence to the purpose of a pair of jeans. One would think you’d want to be sure, but that’s where I’ve been wrong. You don’t want to be sure. You don’t want to care enough. You have to be unsure, because if you think, you won’t buy at all. Thinking is an excuse for those too weak to commit to buying and being anything. Bravery is a product of experience. Buying is a learned skill. I did this, and I do this. And so, life begins at a crawl and defines itself in the real world. At first, you can’t care, because you don’t. That’s the number one truth. Stop worrying that you’re buying things without a care, because you don’t actually care. If you did, you’d be buying something else, books, music, whatever. If you had interests, you’d be buying. If you can’t buy, it’s not because you’re indecisive, it’s because you fear your indecision. What group two has that group three doesn’t are the experience and the bravery and means to buy on impulse. These people don’t ask whether or not happiness comes from the clothes they wear. They haven’t the time to ask. Deep down they might assume it. They don’t have time to analyze. They’re living.
And so, trying to be born is tough when you’re on the track to death already. It’s a slow process. It involves lots of doing the exact opposite of what feels sensible. Think about youth. Does it act sensibly? And you wonder why so many kids are losing it these days? They don’t even know how to be kids. They don’t even know that it’s okay to follow, to relax, to fuck around, and to screw up. Why can’t that be possible? Why is that in the center of all of it, the only people I can blame are the bitchy, spoiled brats of my parents’ generation. Those fucking uptight little losers used to run the streets at night, used to go to parties, used to live it up, and now they have us locked in at night, now they’re giving us drug tests for after school jobs. Now, they’re checking on us, bringing up concerns with the board, herding us into stability saying that the streets are more dangerous than ever. Kids are hating kids, because no one can get anything out of life when our parents have made life so fucking boring. The structure of it is bad enough, we haven’t got time to do much but hate each other and accept our fate. So many of us stay inside. So many of us don’t rock the boat. So many of us haven’t even had a beer, yet. Why? Why the enforcement of the laws so strictly on this generation? What are they afraid of? We’re coming off the greediest population in the world. Our parents wanted it all, and they won’t give shit to us. They’ll pay for anything we can buy, because that at least sends us off in a direction they can understand. They can control the malls, but they can’t control the fact that so many of us rejects just want to go out and have the chance to get laid. So many of us just want to go out and mess up, break shit and run, and get away with murder without worrying about mothers who fear explaining to the rest of the PTA how their son or daughter ended up getting caught. They want us still and quiet, because they want the young women, and they want the young men as nothing but surrogate dildos for corporate America.
This is our battle, really. We need to be reckless. We need to dare to be unstable. We need to dare to discard every intelligent thought we’ve ever had, because there’s plenty of time to think when we’re old and alone. You’re only young once. Only one set of two decades or so of prime fucking time, and everybody’s trying to channel that and distract that sensation. Morality says, “no don’t” and parents say, “not yet” and consciences says, “not unless” and it’s all lies. What’s real is that fact that you wake up wanting something, all else is either an aid or a deterrent.
So, let’s get back to Sarah Highroad, shall we? The trick here is to use whatever you can buy to create yourself as a sexual option. Right? She has to be able to fuck you. It has to have value to her, second. She has to notice first off that I’m around and second that I’m a possible solution to real desire. What can I offer her? That’s what I would have to ask? And that’s when I have to be honest about myself? Do I have a great sex drive? Do I have an enormous penis? What is my criteria for judgment? What makes the thrust of my pelvis more desirable? Does my sweat have any special quality to it? And you have to harp on every detail, because with all the people in the world she doesn’t need to waste time with you. That means you have to exceed the mean, excel beyond the average group two member and become the number one seed in the tournament of dicks.
Who’s on the playing field? You have to identify these people, their strengths, outdo them whatever the cost, and let their weakness take them down. If you don’t assume any other personality than one based on your desire, you have no weaknesses. You’re a machine. Personality is for those who don’t know what they want. If your existence is devoted to the want, you exist only as much you progress. Without having the courage to put it on the front burner, you’ll never succeed. So, I said to myself I would fuck this girl, and I illustrated it to myself in graphic terms one time and refused to be satisfied with vivid, lush imagination of the texture of her body. No, because the experience has to be better. And knowing that experience exists, I can’t rest. My body knew this well before my mind would accept it. It’s taken too long already to get this far. So catching up will be hard as hell.
And that’s where we have problems, because I want to take shortcuts. I want to rely on appearance of the facts. So, I think if I can find a way to cheat Randy Ruth, to outsmart him, then I can get the better of him. That’s Ray, though. That’s his deal, and it never works. Out thinking a girl is impossible. They know you’re doing it. We’re never as smart as we think we are. Lying, in the long run, is harder anyway. How could I feel good about it, spending months learning the right things to say just to steal a little ass? How would I expect her to feel? Good about that? Would she sense that I wanted her deeply? If I did want her, I wanted her enough to lie, but not enough to change. That’s got to hurt. And if I just fucked her, because I wanted to, and she wanted it, she can know that I wanted her enough to rise to her level, enough to hate everything beneath her, enough to stay up there high above the trailer trash and the fat asses. Everyday lived with style and self-esteem would honor her. It would have to. Why feel like shit? Why come a beggar? Why leave indebted? Why not come in as inevitable? Why not leave as the same way?
It is inevitable that I have sex with this woman. Thus, I will do whatever it takes to posses whatever gave Randy Ruth the right to sit near her. I had to respect him for that. He’s no longer the enemy. He’s someone with more a right to her body than I have. That makes him enviable, true, but only a immature little bitch would hate him for it. So, it’s my task to tap this resource, to become friends with Randy Ruth, to know all he knows, be all that he is that could place him anywhere near that girl, and then, I’ll cast him off in search of someone closer. And I’ll get as close as I can, and wait there almost between her thighs, ready and perfect.
***

The first time I went to Randy Ruth was at the weight room at the school. He was on the bench press. I said, “Randy, teach me how to lift that much weight.”
“Fuck you,” he said. So, I punched him in the nuts. Although I’d like to say I held my own, I ran outside, hid behind the doorway, and then punched him in the nuts as he ran out. Then, he got up and beat my face into the nearest wall until my nose bled all over the grass. I sat there waiting until he was done kicking me, then I got some paper towels, stopped the bleeding and walked back into the weight room.

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