Bad Haircut

Harold looked at the Frankmobile. “Is he nice?”

“Yeah, pretty nice. My mom's in there.”

“I want to go with him,” Harold said.

“You mean like running away?”

Harold nodded. “I hate it here. You think he'll take me with him?”

“I'm not sure,” I told him. “Probably.”

We didn't talk for a while. The parking lot was flat and empty, almost like a lake, except for a few stray shopping carts that here and there gleamed silver in the artificial light.

“By the way,” I said, “it was interesting what you told us today. That stuff about hot dogs and hamburgers.”

“Oh that.” He shrugged. “It was in the encyclopedia.”

Seconds later, the door of the Frankmobile swung open. My mother stepped down onto the pavement.

“Buddy?” she called out.

I walked into the light, leaving Harold behind me, alone and invisible in the shadows.

“We're late,” my mother said. “We have to walk fast.”

My father was the assistant manager at a store called Lamp City. It was located just a few blocks from the mini-mall, on an otherwise deserted part of Grand Avenue. After dark you could see it from far away, a small solitary building surrounded by a smoky yellow halo.

There must have been a thousand lamps in there. They hung from the ceiling, stood on the floor, rested on shelves and tables. My father hated it. The glare hurt his eyes and gave him headaches. He tried wearing sunglasses for a while, but his boss got mad. When he got home at night, he sat in his chair in the living room and ate dinner in the dark. Some nights his eyes were so sore he couldn't bear to watch TV or read the paper.

He waited with his hands and face pressed against the front window. His expression changed when he saw us. He smiled and raised one finger, then disappeared in toward the rear of the store. When he hit the master switch, that whole galaxy of lamps went black. My mother turned to me in the sudden darkness and asked if I had done my homework.

Thirteen (#u5f865194-f247-5fee-8139-3ab00b0cc84a)

“It's foolproof,” Kevin explained. “If someone comes in and buys fifteen dollars worth of gas, I just ring up five and keep ten for myself.”

“What about the pump?” I asked. “Doesn't that keep track?”

“Not really. It just goes back to zero every time you flip the switch.”

Gas was expensive that summer, in 1974, and for a few weeks we were rich. Kevin bought me albums, food, and sporting goods with the money he stole from Paul's Amoco. He paid his brother's friend Burnsy to drive us to Yankee Stadium and Bowcraft Amusement Park. Every time I returned from one of these excursions I told my mother the same half-lie. I said that Paul had paid for everything.

Paul was Kevin's new stepfather. He had met Mrs. Ross on the supermarket checkout line in February and married her in March. When he moved in, he bought Kevin a fantastic ten-speed bike and tried to be his friend. But Kevin didn't want to be friends. He claimed that Paul was a sex maniac.

“Listen to this,” Kevin said, just a few weeks after the wedding. He slipped a cassette into his tape player and cranked up the volume. All I could hear was loud static with vague murmurs in the background.

“What is it?”

“They're humping.” he said. “Can't you tell?”

He rewound the tape. The murmurs turned into soft moans and deep sighs. I had a hard time connecting these sounds with Kevin's mother, a thin quiet woman who smoked extra-long cigarettes and told him to be careful every time he left the house.

“I swear,” he said. “It's all they ever do.”

Kevin's real father had died a long time ago. He had been an amateur boxer. Kevin had once come to a Halloween party dressed in gym shorts and boxing gloves, with his father's jockstrap and huge protective cup fitted over his head like a mask. Whenever someone asked him what he was, he lifted the cup away from his face with his fat leather thumbs and said, “I'm a dick, what are you?”

A sticky heat wave rolled in early that summer, right after school let out. We got in the habit of going to Kevin's house in the afternoon to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone on channel eleven. Sometimes Kevin's older brother Jack would be there with Burnsy and a couple other guys, smoking pot from a red plastic bong. Jack had just graduated from high school, but he didn't seem too interested in finding a job. He made all the money he needed selling nickel bags to kids who hung out at the Little League and McDonald's. Kevin and I didn't get high—we had just finished seventh grade—but we liked to pretend we did, watching TV through our eyelashes and laughing hysterically at the commercials for Peter Lemongello's Greatest Hits and truck-driver training.

Paul barged in on us right in the middle of a great Twilight Zone, the one where the businessman steps into a time warp and returns, as an adult, to the world of his childhood. He meets his ten-year-old self on the playground and begs him to appreciate the beauty and wonder of youth while he still has time and not to be in such a big hurry to grow up. The kid pounds his baseball mitt, and says, “Sure, mister, whatever you say.”

“Wow,” said Jack. “Is that intense or what?”

We heard keys jangling, but it was too late to move. Paul stood in the doorway looking hot and grimy in his oil-stained work clothes. I thought he was going to deliver a big lecture, but he just turned off the TV and stared at us like we were Martians.

“Don't you guys have anything better to do?”

There were six of us in the room. One by one, we shook our heads.

The next day Kevin and Jack began manning the pumps at Paul's Amoco. Jack hated it so much that he quit after two days and moved down to Seaside, where some guys he knew were renting a house for the summer. Kevin stuck with the job and began stealing from Paul.

It didn't occur to me to think it was wrong. Ever since I'd met Kevin, he'd been doing crazy things and dragging me along. On the morning of our First Holy Communion, we'd slipped into the Sunday school cafeteria and raided a tray of jelly donuts; we got powdered sugar all over our new blue suits. For our first and only Webelos camping trip, Kevin had shoplifted a gigantic T-bone steak, which we never got around to cooking, though we did have a great time banging each other over the head with it inside our tent. We threw snowballs at cars, ordered pizzas for people we didn't like, and played whiffle ball when there was nothing else to do. He was my best friend.

The night he told me about the money, Kevin took me to Shoe Town and bought us identical pairs of Puma sneakers. Before we went home, we took off our old sneakers, knotted the laces together, and tossed them at a telephone line on Center Street. We didn't stop until both pairs were dangling from the wire, kicking back and forth like they were walking on air.

* * *

I was with Kevin at the St. Agnes carnival in Cranwood the night he first laid eyes on Angela Farrone. We were standing by the food booths, spearing french fries from a paper cone.

“Look at that,” he said. “By the Porta-John.”

She was a gum-snapping bleached blond about our age, a knockout in a white tube top and jeans so tight that Kevin said she probably had to pack herself in with a shoehorn. In one hand she held a green helium balloon on a string, in the other a goldfish in a little plastic bag filled with water. The door of the Porta-John popped open and a scrawny redhead stepped out, glancing sheepishly around. She took the balloon from her friend and the two of them entered the moving crowd, like cars merging with highway traffic.

We followed them past the bake sale, the wheels of fortune, and the creaky rent-a-rides, then out of the carnival and down a sidestreet littered with ripped tickets and greasy paper plates. They stopped beneath a streetlight, huddling together with their backs turned in our direction. The green balloon jerked up and down above their heads. We caught up with them just as they stepped apart, hands empty at their sides. For one miraculous moment the balloon and the fish were suspended in midair, connected by the string. Then they started to rise.

We stood with our heads back, watching the balloon gain altitude as it drifted upward and eastward over the treetops, toward New York City. The goldfish glinted orange in the light, then disappeared, like a match flaring out.

“Hey,” Kevin said. “Why'd you do that?” The blond shrugged. “The last time I brought a fish home, my Dad flushed it down the toilet.”

Kevin called Angela every night for a week, but she kept hanging up on him. Then he had an idea. He bought a dozen roses and hired me—I was good in school—to write her a letter.

Dear Angela,

My name is Kevin Ross and I have a crush on you. We met on Friday night outside the Carnival. I've been thinking about your fish. Maybe it got lucky and fell in a lake! Will you please come to the movies with me sometime soon? We can see anything you want.

Your (hopefully) friend,

Kevin Ross

P.S.—In case you're wondering, I've employed a friend to give us a ride.