Lawn Boy(11)
At once dazed and energized, I watched my old life recede in the rearview mirror. Something had to happen now, right? Something had to give, my life had to begin. Didn’t it?
Drinking the Kool-Aid
I was in third grade when my mom took the job as the milk lady at our elementary school. Nate, who should’ve been in the sixth, repeated fifth grade, where he spent his days in the moldering portable out by the soccer field. I envied him, actually. He got to watch videos and screw around with finger paints and construction paper and eat paste all day long. Meanwhile, little Mike Mu?oz, still wearing the same dirty coat with the fake-fur collar, stuck to the far end of the cafeteria at lunch, not drinking milk, clutching his free meal ticket tight as he inched his way through the line, pretending not to notice his mom waving at him from across the room.
Yeah, I know, it was a dick move, ignoring my mom. What can I say? I wasn’t exactly flush with social currency in third grade. Beyond Nick, I didn’t really have anyone I could call a friend. I was a scrubby, undersized half Mexican, whose brother was a freak of nature. My high water pants and my green lunch ticket were indignity enough. I couldn’t have my mom waving at me in the cafeteria.
After school, three nights a week, Mom went to her second job, waitressing at Campana’s in Poulsbo, which left me to take care of Nate. Since the library was about the easiest place to keep him occupied, we’d spend two or three hours a day there, Nate flipping through piles and piles of board books, sucking and twisting his shirt collar until it was heavy with spittle and hopelessly stretched out. He’d spend hours rapping his knuckles on the side of the aquarium so that the startled clown fish darted about crazily. Always nearby, I read White Fang or Treasure Island or Gulliver’s Travels, books with vivid settings far from my world and far from Nate.
Mom started taking us to a little Methodist church. The church was good to us. I’m not sure how much Mom believed in the gospel, or whether she prayed for our sins or knew the words to the hymns, but she believed in the church—as a resource, anyway. So on most Sundays she dressed us in our cleanest clothes, combed our hair, and we went to church, smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Mom stayed after the service and served coffee in the banquet room, and the married men chatted her up as Nate and I ate lemon bars and stale cookies and filled our pockets with sugar packets and creamers.
Thursday evenings, Nate and I went to the youth-group meeting at the church and played wholesome games designed to engender trust and communication and unwavering faith in God. We sang songs about building our houses on rocks and about how Jesus loved the little children. There were always snacks, of which we partook greedily: graham crackers and little paper cups full of grapes. I drank the Kool-Aid, but I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean. It’s not that I had anything against Jesus or God, I was just underwhelmed by the evidence.
I think those nights when we were at youth group were about the only break my mom ever got from us, an hour and a half a week on Thursday evenings. And you know where she spent it? At the Laundromat. These days, it may look like my mom’s not trying very hard, but then I consider how far she’s come and all the bullshit she’s had to endure, and I figure she’s doing all right.
As dull as the Bible study and singing were, I looked forward to Thursday nights. For one, I didn’t have to manage Nate. There was a teacher for that. It gave me a break for a while. All told, there were eight or nine other kids, including my hero, Doug Goble, long before he became the hottest real-estate agent in Kitsap County. It’s not that Doug Goble was particularly winsome or athletic or anything like that. He had a fetal cast to him, actually, like he wasn’t fully cooked when he came out of the oven. I’m not saying he was all curled up or anything, but his head had a lightbulb aspect to it, and his nose was flat and undersized. I think the appeal for me was that Doug Goble had confidence, charisma even, though he was poor like me and, like me, lived on the res in a manufactured home with dirty siding and a cluttered carport. Doug Goble could talk to girls and adults. He was decisive and self-assured, which made him persuasive. He possessed that quality I most associated with winners: certainty.
“You see this church?” he’d say. “Someday, I’m gonna live in a house twice as big as this dump. And the roof won’t leak. And it’ll be right in town, where everybody can see it. I’m gonna have a huge laundry room with a maid. And she’ll have big jugs, too.”
And I believed it, every word of it. I guess I needed to believe it. I would have done just about anything to impress Doug Goble. I laughed at his jokes, listened raptly to his plans of world domination, hoping that at the very least he’d let me ride on his coattails.
“It’s all just a big game of Monopoly. Dummies and nice guys always lose.”
God, how I wanted to be a winner. How I longed for that certainty, when everything in my life was so uncertain. Goble tolerated me for the most part, as long as I kept laughing and listening. Until one day, he just abandoned me with no explanation. I always reasoned it was because I was a loser or maybe just a sucker. Anyway, our lives took different trajectories after that. Goble grew into himself and became one of the popular kids who sat at the same table in the cafeteria with the other popular kids who, in retrospect, weren’t actually popular, just feared and admired, and mostly wealthy. Goble was forced to bluff on the wealthy part or to compensate with confidence and guile.