Stoner & Spaz (13 page)

Yesterday, Marcie and I watched part of
Chinatown,
Roman Polanski’s great neo-noir thriller. It covers the whole William Mulholland / Owens Valley water scandal better than any history book I ever read. Without the aqueduct, L.A. would still be what the Chumash called it: “The valley of smoke.” And the pollution then wasn’t smog from cars and trucks, just smoke from their camp-fires.

I look at the buildings and the cars and the busy streets. It’s hard to believe people lived in tents and adobe shacks and walked around in moccasins and hunted and fished. Nobody went to an office or to school.

There was C.P. then, too, I’ll bet. There’s always bad stuff. What happened to a Chumash kid with C.P.? Did he sit around with the women and bitch about the maize?

In grade school, I did a report once on the Chumash, and they were hard-core about manhood. A kid gets to be fourteen or so, and it’s time for “fasting, hallucinogenic rituals, and trials of endurance.” And that last one means — I’m not kidding — lying on anthills. Anthills populated by red ants. Those big mothers.

The funny thing is, I could do that. Maybe, anyway. Probably. I’ve been through more than most kids, and I didn’t wimp out. Ever. Hospitals, tests, physical therapy, all of it.

So I could probably lie there while the ants bit me and some shaman chanted about the seven giants that held up the world, but when I got up, I’d limp. Courageous but crippled. The really cool guys would get the Minnie Ha Ha girls, with their little fringed skirts, and I’d get Moody Boo Hoo, Minnie’s bipolar sister.

Unless I could sit with the elders, the Old Ones, and listen. Native Americans have great origin myths. There are Sky Fathers and Earth Mothers and Grandmother Spiders. There are Rainbow Serpents and moon goddesses.

I’ll bet I could’ve been that kind of storyteller then, the way Marcie says I’m the kind of storyteller I am now. The kind with a camera and a computer. I don’t have to run fast or shoot straight to tell stories. I can do it sitting down.

At school, I can’t help myself. I look for Colleen. I want to see her and I don’t want to see her. I want to talk to her and I don’t. I want her to be sorry she took off with that guy, and if she is, it’ll just make me mad because she can never be sorry enough.

I sit through history and social studies, then hobble down to eat lunch. Colleen almost never eats at school. She and Ed used to climb in his car, fire up a joint, then inhale four orders of onion rings at Wolfies. And she still had beautiful skin. Once when we were alone at Marcie’s, she took off all her —

“Hey, man.”

It’s Reshay Pettiford. He’s about six three, wearing a Kobe tank top two hundred times too big for him.

I step away from the big double doors that lead into the cafeteria and the usual lemming suicide stampede. “What’s up?” I ask.

“I want you to put me in your movie. You talked to Debra. You got her side the story. I want you to get my side. She come on to me. She was all, ‘You don’t have to worry. It’s taken care of.’ And the next thing I know, it’s, ‘You my baby daddy. You got to do the right thing.’ You know what I mean, little man. She’s like that Colleen. She’d go with anybody.”

“Colleen’s not that way. She won’t go with just anybody.”

“She went with you.”

“And I’m what? The bottom of the barrel?”

“I’m just saying.”

I look hard at him. He’s either been shooting hoops or he’s scared to death, because he’s dripping sweat. He’s not Native American, but I can guess his origin myth: the earth was without form and void until Phil Jackson came along with the triangle defense and covered part of the earth with highly polished maple.

“The movie you’re talking about is kind of done,” I tell him. “It opened at eight p.m. and closed at ten.”

He grimaces. “Dang. I’ll bet it don’t make me look good.”

“You can see it if you want.”

He shakes his head. “That’s all right. I know it make me out to be the fool.” He wipes his face by pulling up the tank top and using it like a towel. “You gonna do another one?” he asks. “Let everybody else testify?”

I nod. “We’ll see, okay?” That’s an answer I learned from my grandma. It always means there’s no way.

He holds out one fist and I tap it with my good hand. Everybody’s afraid of the other one. Everybody except Colleen.

“Let me have my say when you do, awright?”

He’s through with me then and charges through the doors and heads right for his homies. Somebody whips a basketball to him at what looks to me like almost the speed of light. Reshay charges, dribbling low and hard a couple of times, making tricky moves, ball between his legs, head fake — the whole NBA tryouts package, and right in the corner of the school cafeteria.

To be able to do that. To be agile and dexterous.

I look for an empty table. There are my classmates: Preppy, Sporty, Goth, Emo, Skater, Mansonite, Mean Girl (aka Heather, from
Heathers,
a Michael Lehmann movie I’ve seen about six times).

“So, am I famous yet?”

I turn around and there’s Oliver Atkins, looking like he just stepped out of a Banana Republic ad. As usual.

I tell him, “You missed it.”

He points, so I take a cafeteria tray and shuffle forward while he says, “Why don’t you dice and slice that little movie of yours and put the best parts on YouTube.”

“And your part would be the best part, right?”

“One of, anyway.”

Right in front of me is something in a big pan that looks like curds and whey. I point and wait for the lady in the hairnet to hand it over.

That’s when I see Colleen. She’s wearing a flimsy little dress and trashed motorcycle boots with the laces undone. She’s not lining up for lunch, either. She’s looking around.

I tell Oliver good-bye, put my head down, pay for my lunch, scuttle toward an empty corner, and pretend to eat. I try to act surprised when she sits across from me. Her skin is see-through pale, and everything just stands still for a second.

She says, “I thought I’d test the limits of the word
tardy
.”

I glance at my watch and pretend to be casual. “So far, so good.”

“What were you talking to Reshay about?”

I shrug. “He wants his say if I ever make another documentary.”

“So you’d what? Follow him around with a camera? I can tell you how that’s going to come out. He’ll go to some community college on a little scholarship, flunk out, then come back here and get in trouble.”

I pick at my lunch. Colleen reaches across, takes a little bit between her fingers, inspects it, puts it back.

RON KOERTGE
is the author of many celebrated novels, including
Deadville, Strays, Margaux with an X, The Arizona Kid, Where the Kissing Never Stops, The Brimstone Journals,
and
Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II,
the sequel to
Stoner & Spaz
. He says, “My wife works with the learning disabled and the physically disabled. One night she came home and told me about a young man with C.P. — and a terrific sense of humor. Coincidentally, that day I talked to a former student of mine who’d recently been in rehab for substance abuse. What would happen, I wondered, if those two knew each other? Two months later — the first draft of
Stoner & Spaz.
” Ron Koertge lives in California.