Tom Schreck - Out Cold

"Duffy could you do me a favor today?"

"For you, boss, anything."

"Vorhees High School has a computer they want to donate. Could you drive out there and get it?"

"Sure."

"This won't be an excuse for not having your paperwork up to date. I trust you've gotten caught up at this point."

"Of course," I said. I never passed on a chance to go for a ride and get out of the office. I wasn't in the mood for paperwork anyway. It was also, maybe, a chance to snoop around about my buddy Karl.

Vorhees High is in the hills about 20 miles away, and I took the nice drive. Vorhees is one of the small villages people escaped to when they left Crawford. More and more Crawford was starting to feel like a northern borough of New York City and the Crawfordians weren't pleased with it.

Going into a high school is always a trip. It surprises me just how young the kids are and how much skin the girls show on the average school day. I don't know if that's Brittney's, Paris's or Lindsay's fault, but I knew if I was fourteen and had to sit around all day and pretend I wasn't looking at the half naked girls around me, I'd go out of my mind. I remember keeping my hands in my pockets to hide my day dreams enough back in McDonough.

McDonough was what I pictured a high school should look like. Old, made of concrete and smelled of disinfectant and whatever it is they season schools with. McDonough was probably a modern school when it was built in the 40's, but the 40's happened a while ago and it wasn't modern anymore. There had a few computers around, but not as many as you'd think in today's high school. When you did see a computer, the off-white plastic looked like an out of place anachronism as if they didn't belong there or at least not yet. McDonough was dark, not very friendly, and it carried the weight of the years it spent in the worst section of the city.

VHS gave off a much different feel. First of all, it was bright with a forced cheeriness that didn't fool me for a second. It had a smell to it that was probably a newer more eco-friendly disinfectant and different type of floor wax. The kids looked different than the kids at MHS. These kids were almost all white. There were a few Indian kids whose dads, I guessed, were doctors, and just one or two black kids. The place reeked of Abercrombie and Fitch, and the girls went to tanning salons and got their nails done. Somehow it seemed a meaner, more exclusionary place even though it was far less diverse than its inner city counterparts. Maybe at McDonough had more skin colors, but fewer classes of people.

I had to buzz my way into the school, sign in, get a big orange badge, and be escorted to my destination. I know about Columbine and all the other high school dangers, but the whole system struck me as bizarre. As if I came to the place with some sort of high-powered assault weapon, a buzzer, a badge, and an escort would somehow deter me.

My escort was a five-foot tall guy with a wispy mustache and squeaky plastic shoes. His nametag said Mr. Teters. He struck me as the kind of teacher who gets spitballs shot at his head for eight hours a day. He didn't say 'Hello' or anything else and just walked with me in silence. He pointed me down a hallway toward their storage room, past the 'Snack Attack' collection boxes I now realized were everywhere, and let me go. Apparently, my danger to VHS had been assessed and deemed low, or it was dangerously close to my escort's break. Just before the storage room I noticed the nurse's office. The door was open and a couple kids hung around surely trying to get a medical reason to blow off social studies or whatever the hell Mr. Teters taught. Under the nurse's office sign the name placard said 'Ms. Bentley.'

I guess I had stood in front of the door for longer than I thought because I was interrupted by a pretty thirty-something woman with short black hair just barely touching her shoulders and an attractive, but a bit weathered, face. Pretty kind of overstated it-she looked like ten years ago she was a knockout and since then life had gotten in the way.

"Can I help you?" She didn't smile. Behind her a fat kid held his stomach and groaning on the couch.

"Jimmy, stop it. Your mother's coming in and you'll get to go home." Jimmy immediately stopped and suppressed a smile.

"Are you Ms. Bentley?"

"Yeah…"

"My name is Duffy Dombrowski. I'm a counselor at Jewish Unified Services."

"Yeah?"

"Do you have a second to talk?"

She looked at fatso Jimmy, who had ceased moaning.

"Sure, come in to my office."

She ushered me into a small office with a battleship grey desk. There were posters on the wall about brushing your teeth, underage drinking, and abstinence from sex.

"What can I help you with?"

"I'm your ex-husband Sparky's counselor and…"

"He wasn't ever my husband, and I don't have anything to do with him any more."

"Yeah and-"

"Is that why you're here? I didn't sign up to be part of his treatment. You can't just come out and talk to people without permission. Do you have a release? Are you familiar with HIPPA regs?"

I had forgotten she belonged in the human services sisterhood.

"I know, this is technically wrong. It isn't an official visit. I'm actually here picking up a used computer."

"What?"

"You see, I wanted to let you know Sparky is doing really, really well. He's going to meetings, he's taking getting better very seriously."

"Well, I'm glad for him, but we are very much through." She shook her head and looked away from me.

"Look, this isn't any of my business, but not being able to see his little girl is really messing with Sparky. He's trying…"

"That's it, this conversation is over." She stood up. "You are one of the most unprofessional human service people I've ever run into. You don't just go up to people you don't know, not ask their side of the story, and plead your case. I'm sorry, I've got to go back to work." She walked around the desk and past me.

"Just think about it. I'm betting he never had a counselor advocate for him like this. Let that mean something, Ms. Bentley."

She didn't say anything. She went out and checked on fatso Jimmy, who was amusing himself by making fart noises into the back of his hand.

I grabbed the old Mac computer with the handle on the back and headed down the hallway. We had a Windows system at the clinic, which rendered this donation pretty useless, but that's how human services donations worked.

When I got to the lobby, I took a look at the school's trophy case. I loved looking at the dated trophies, faded leather footballs and basketballs, and the cut away nets from championship games. VHS played in the Suburban League, made up of all white country boys and rich kids. They never ever went up against McDonough or any of the other urban schools. It was part of why their parents moved out here in the first place. I looked at the football stuff from their big Suburban League championship year in '99. The Mountain Crows went 101 and lost the Class B state championship in overtime on what the plaque suggested was a bad call. The memorabilia saluted the players and the heroes of the great '99 time. On the Suburban league trophy they had the coach and the captains names engraved: Coach Skip Steenburg, Captains Mike Pendergast, Bill Meyerson, Chip Newstrom, and Karl Greene.

Yep, Karl Greene.

"Can I help you, sir?" A guy in a VHS golf shirt, with a whistle around his neck, said.

"Nah, I was just going down memory lane with the Mountain Crows."

"You can't hang around. You have an orange pass, red."

"I don't follow?"

"The orange ones are temps. You need a red one to hang around all day."

"Oh, sorry," I said, though I wasn't sure about what. "Hey, can I ask you something?"