Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (3 page)

When Wicked College John—or as I should call him, Recently-Issued-Restraining-Order John—shakes my own hand, he does this finger-hook move that you know he clearly does with his Mook-Platter friends at Bonaventure. He's tall
as a male model, pores leaking cologne, permanent hangover swell under his eyes. What looks like white deodorant streak on his pea coat.

“Telling you man, it's good to be back,” Wicked College John says to me and Toby.

I nod, Toby nods, but half of my face is looking at Rambocream and Necro, who are walking away toward what is, I guess, Rambocream's car—this red econo-Nissan parked along the curb on Eastman.

“… but this whole business with the girlfriend, really been messing with my grades,” Wicked College John is saying, looking around and shifting his feet. “I got two B's; I got a C. All I was doing was calling, trying to tell her I was studying, I was in deep concentration, and that I threw that coffee mug at the
wall
, out of a
general
anger. But she made, like, eighty copies—she gave the form to her work, her friends' apartments? But she's eighteen. She doesn't have an outside-world …”

Wicked College John's voice fades. Necro and Rambo-cream open Rambocream's hatchback and lean their heads in.

“So, I've had a lot of adversity, really,” Wicked College John is saying, “a lot of abrasive personalities to deal with. But it's good to come back, see you guys. Really helps someone see what they have going for them away from here.”

“Wait, what are you talking about?” Lip Cheese, who we've forgotten about, says from behind us. His jacket is caution-sign yellow, with bungee pull-tabs everywhere. He's wearing a pull-down mask-hat, and his lips push out beak-like through the hat's mouth hole. Just standing there.

Toby and Wicked College John laugh so hard they have to brace their hands on their thighs. Lip Cheese wipes his mouth with his sleeve, and his lips start to twitch, so you know he's shutting down a little.

Don't even bring it up, guys!” he says. “I haven't cried since the Ten-Ten-Ten Girls hit me with the pillow!”

Wicked College John claps Lip Cheese on the back and jolts him into Toby. I would laugh too. But I hear Rambocream's car trunk slam, and see Necro clearly smile at something Rambocream says as they walk back and rejoin us. Necro unfolds some yellow looseleaf sheets of paper from his pocket and hands them to Rambocream. Then, though, from the creators of
Oh Shit: The Movie
, I notice the papers in Rambocream's hand are drawings!

I try to tell myself: Maybe Rambocream just lent Necro the drawings and Necro was returning them? But one drawing is of a vampire with bear paws, a walking cane, and a collar on his cape that's as tall as a lampshade.
VAMPAW
, the name reads at the bottom of the paper, in Necro's square-shaped handwriting. Another of what appears to be a whale, with human hands for fins, and metal armor covering six breasts on its underside.

But Lip Cheese is in the middle of saying, “… I dumped it back into the wine box and taped it back up! Sorry I have respect for my parents, Toby!”

So I chime in—because Necro never not-laughs at this: “More like dumped it back into the Sock Hospital, Lip Cheese!”

I look at Necro hard to see if he's watching. But he's busy
using his hand as a clipboard, clickable pencil wobbling on its axis, shading something in on a drawing of a snake whose tongue is a hatchet.

So I jam my Bills winter hat down my jacket and into my armpit and make my voice higher and whisperier to impersonate Lip Cheese: “It's dishydrosis, guys! It's a
sweat condition
! Wait: What are you talking about?”

“Wait, what are you talking …” Lip Cheese begins to say.

Toby and Wicked College John crack up, but it's a total waste of an Uncomebackable Insult. Because Necro isn't paying attention, and Rambocream dangles his keys from his finger and goes: “Well, we should probably, you know.”

Necro pulls down his parka zipper to his neck, and I notice he's wearing this white dress shirt and a red tie. “We have Weapons of Mankind tonight,” he says.

His jaw muscle flexes. Toby and I are already looking at each other.

“We sell various rare weaponry—novelties and collectibles on a limited signal public broadcast,” Rambocream says, in Upstate New York's flat-voweled nasal accent. “Factory-sharp inventory unavailable in some states. World War II-era emphasis, historical Germany. Heritage weaponry, really,” he says, and, taking a deep breath, “Heritage.”

Except right when Rambocream says that, I notice a patch on the left half of his vest with a sewn illustration of a large-lipped monkey dragging a pail of water in each hand. His vest has a shiny metal pin, too—not of a swastika, but the other one that looks like a plus sign, with the ends curved slightly out like trumpets. Gold border, red in the middle—tiny
like a Polo emblem. That's when entire cities in my head lose their gravity. Because what Hitler did, back then? Textbook Colonel Hellstache. But I remember that I can never remember if the plus sign stood for Nazi Germany, or just World War II, or Germany's air force, or just Europe. Then I remember, I think, that the pin stands for Europe, which means I don't know anymore what the monkey stands for, and I don't know what this says about Necro.

So I ask: “Well, Necro? Are we invited to this shit show?”

Necro looks at Rambocream. Neither of them says no.

So, as with howevermany stupid years that have passed between us all, we cram into the Vomit Cruiser and follow Rambocream's car into downtown Rochester, a place big enough to be a city but small enough to have an Inner City.

On 104, grains of road salt spray through the Vomit Cruiser's undercarriage.

“I visited their weapons booth last Christmas, and mankind
is
his weapons, guys,” Necro says. “Weapons are preparedness. State and local governments? They can seize your property anytime to build a highway. Look at 490. Eminent domain. Waco. Our police-state postal service? With postmaster general Nicolae Ceauşescu who can just take and control our very means of transmitting lingual expression?”

“So no Century Club tonight? Not even Jaeger Cowpunch?” Wicked College John says. “Will there at least be some Irondequoit girls there?”

Necro chuckles through his nose. Wicked College John hacks at Necro's arm from the back seat, which yanks the car
one lane over. A few crumpled papers shake loose from under the passenger seat into my seat well.

As in: More drawings! On a napkin, a building that looks like a courthouse exploding, with a silhouette of a kitten with bat wings hovering in front of it. On a flattened McDonald's bag, a wizard, standing biblical and stiff, arm extended at a right angle, a stalactite of beard hanging from his chin. Behind the wizard, a castle is on fire.

Which, me and Necro: Our whole junior high, we would stay up and draw at sleepovers—a drawing of Slayer onstage maybe, or that time we made up Man-Serum Bagelheart, who had a shovel for one arm and whose digestive system can convert rocks into orange juice. But to draw now, post Trestles Phase?

Wicked College John picks up one of the drawings. “Necro, what is this Faggot-Lane Walkery?” he says, which I sort of agree with.

“Take and don't either of you even ask the subject!” Necro says, with out-of-nowhere teeth-grindingness, voice like if charcoal could bark. “Don't you dare even broach it!”

“But I want to know your feelings, bro,” Wicked College John says. “A lot of expressives tend to have bad childhoods: pervy uncles, Kangaroos for Kids …”

“You'll be in big trouble if you keep talking, John!” Necro says.

“Don't let his eleven German Shepherds know about Kangaroo for a Kid, John,” I go (because: Vampaw? the other ones?). “They're very possessive.”

But I immediately feel horrible bringing up the one
Uncomebackable Insult against Necro, because Necro wasn't even at his house when Kangaroo for a Kid happened, and I never found Kangaroo for a Kid all that funny anyway. And he looks at me in the rearview mirror with this new, cold humanless look, the way some anime villains have sleek eyes with no irises. And now I know he's seen something terrible inside of me, but I have no idea what, and there's a part of me that wants to sweep every person and every sound out of the city, and follow Necro quietly through the streets for the rest of my life, and ask him, over and over: But what do you mean? But what do you mean?

Then I notice, on a sheet of yellow looseleaf: A man, whose eyes extend outward like telescopes, holding between a pair of tongs a miniature house that's on fire; he appears to be setting it in a glass case with other houses on fire. On the back of an ATM receipt, a Kodak logo with human eyes melts. But the drawing I stare at the longest, that throws a long grim-reaper hood over my brain and keeps it there forever, is on the back of what looks like a page from a school essay. In that drawing, a single, tiny sperm, tail like a fishhook, floats against the moon above a burning Applebee's. The Applebee's looks almost exactly like the sad cube of the Main Applebee's—where Necro always bought me fries—in Gates, which was always enough of a town to have an Applebee's, but not a good Applebee's with the newer menus, or with the seat leather whose color hasn't been punched out of it.

“We were kidding, Necro,” I say. Which we only ever say as a last resort.

A panel of ice snaps silently off a semi ahead of us, rotates,
and explodes softly on the road. We take an exit into the Mattresses in the Streets District. Houses are boarded up but with satellite dishes mounted to the roofs; others have second-floor doors on the outside but with the stairs or balconies fallen off. Necro's face is snarled up and witch-like.

“All I can say is: Life is precious, Nate,” he says. “You especially, John. What I'm about to take and undertake with my life tonight, what I'm about to undertake with the world tonight, could be immense.”

Downtown, Rambocream lifts up the guard gate to a brick building that has the words
ROCHESTER PUBLIC BROADCASTING
painted above the door. Metal clanks in a hockey bag that Necro lifts out of Rambocream's car trunk and heaves over his shoulder. Across the street, vines grow out of a mailbox at a boarded-up post office, and a place called Good Times Pizza has maybe four things on the front shelf. Houses with heavy doors have balconies that are held up with orange seat-belt-like straps from the roofs.

Right then some barrel-shaped black lady, hair pulled back tight, white-blouse-type outfit and black leather sneakers, walks toward us. With her face totally neutral, she draws back her purse—this hot maroon, rhinestone-covered thing—and whips Rambocream on the left arm with it. Necro and Wicked College John and Toby immediately get between her and Rambocream, shoes squeaking on the sidewalk. She draws her purse back again, face still neutral, and swings again.

“That patch is really not a good idea,” she says, purse strap coiled around Necro's arm, voice stern in an office sort of way.

“This patch is an historical item, ma'am,” Rambocream says from around Necro's head, fistfulling his vest's monkey patch and raising it at her. “By no means do any of us sympathize with any act of oppression. This is a collector's …”

Her purse hits him in the mouth. “We're gonna get shot,” Lip Cheese mumbles to himself.

“Hitler was a product of incest, ma'am!'” Wicked College John yells, hand planted in the woman's collarbone, purse strap whipping around his torso. “A product of incest! Would I say that if we didn't hate him?”

Her body is fuming Avon. “That's a bad idea, sir. That's really not a good idea,” she keeps saying, voice level as she walks away, backward, still facing us as she rounds the corner.

Rambocream sniffles and squirms away from Necro and Wicked College John. Something wet—a tear, snot—flings off of him.

“Do they know the history of these weapons?” he says, heaving. “Why don't we round up all the history books in the world and burn those? Every time a few friends want to do a show, this city, with their lawyerly word-pairings, just …”

Necro sets his hand on Rambocream's shoulder and says, “Take it easy buddy. We hear you.” Buddy?

Even worse, I actually take it easy even less, like I've totally Been Promoted to President of the Diarrhea Fan Club, when we enter the building, into a back room with a concrete floor and a ceiling with exposed beams. Maybe thirty folding chairs face a small stage, with studio lights to its left
and right. Wicked College John lights a cigarette to look less nervous. It feels, slightly, like we're not actually allowed in here, like when you visit a neighbor's house when they're on vacation.

Necro and Rambocream immediately go into military setup mode; dropping the hockey bags on the floor, gripping zippers with their fists and yanking them hard across the bags, like a samurai slashing open a stomach. Necro hangs up a large, tan curtain that extends to the floor. The lettering on the curtain reads
THE WEAPONS OF MANKIND.
Above the logo are fabric cuttings of two crossing knives and a large eagle head. Rambocream folds out a cafeteria table on the stage, and Necro sets three footlong lengths of tree trunk on the table, each slotted with stab marks.