Andrew Smith: Grasshopper Jungle

This is my history.

LOUIS ASKS A RHETORICAL QUESTION

WE LEANED OURbacks against the cinder-block wall, smoking in the cut of shade from a green rolling dumpster, and at just about the same time I talked Robby into taking his car to drive us over to Shann Collin’s new old house, I looked up and noticed the population of Grasshopper Jungle had increased uncomfortably.

Four boys from Herbert Hoover High, the public school, had been watching us while they leaned against the galvanized steel railing along the edge of the stairway we had been using for a ramp.

“Candy Cane faggots, getting ready to make out with each other in Piss Alley.”

The Candy Cane thing—that was what Hoover Boys enjoyed calling boys from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Not just because it kind of rhymed. We had to wear ties to school. Whoever invented the uniform could have planned better to avoid the striped red-and-white design of them. Because when we’d wear our ties, white shirts, and blue sweaters with the little embroidered crosses inside bloodred hearts, you couldn’t help but think we looked like, well, patriotic, Christian-boy candy canes.

But Robby and I weren’t big enough losers to still be wearing our uniforms while skating.

Well, we weren’t so much skating as smoking cigarettes, actually.

Robby wore a Hormel Spam T-shirt and baggy jeans with holes in them he sagged so low you could see half his citrus-motif boxers. They had oranges and lemons on them.

Citrus does not grow in Iowa.

I wore yellow-and-green basketball shorts and a black Orwells tee. So we didn’t look like candy cane boys.

The Orwells are a punk band from Illinois.

The other part—the faggot part—well, let’s just say Robby got picked on.

A lot.

I only knew one of the boys: Grant Wallace. It’s hard not to know pretty much every kid in a town the size of Ealing, even if you didn’t pay too much attention to people as a rule.

However, I did know this: Grant and his friends were there for no other reason than to start crap.

It was bound to be historic, too.

And two 140-pound Candy Cane faggot sophomores with cigarettes and skateboards were not likely to stop anything four bored and corn-fed twelfth-graders from Hoover had in mind.

Robby just sat back casually against the wall, puffing away on his cigarette.

I couldn’t help but think he looked like a guy in one of those old black-and-white movies about firing squads and blindfolds and the Foreign Legion and shit like that.

One of Grant’s friends, a pudgy guy with a face full of white-heads and only one eyebrow, took his cell phone out from his pocket and began recording video of us.

Consult history: Nothing good ever happens when cell phones are used to record video.

And I guess that was as good as Grant’s directorial cue to begin.

“Let me and Tyler borrow you guys’ skateboards for a few minutes. We’ll bring them back.”

Tyler must have been the mule-faced kid on Grant’s right, because he nodded, all excited, an encouragement for us to be cooperative Candy Cane faggots .

But Robby said no before the question was entirely out of Grant’s mouth.

The truth is—and history will back me up on this, too—that when kids like Grant ask kids like me and Robby if they can borrow stuff like skateboards, the boards are either going to get stolen, or the kids like me and Robby are going to be beaten up and then the boards are going to get stolen.

The way kids like me and Robby get beaten up first is when one of them says no.

History class is over for today.

We got beaten up by Grant Wallace, Tyler, and some other kid who smelled like he had barf on his sleeves, while the fourth kid filmed it with his cell phone.

Oh, and extra credit in history: You should never wear loose mesh basketball shorts and boxer underwear if you’re going to get kneed in the balls. Just so you know for the future.

I don’t even think either one of us made it all the way to his feet before the kicks and punches started. Robby got a bloody nose.

Grant took our boards and chucked them up onto the roof of The Pancake House .

Then the four Hoover Boys took our shoes off and threw them on the roof, too.

And if the boards didn’t make such a racket when they landed, Grant and his friends would have taken Robby’s and my pants and sent them up to shoe-and-skateboard heaven, too. But the Chinese guy named Louis who worked in the kitchen of The Pancake House stuck his face out the back door, and asked, politely, what we thought we were doing.

I do not know what I thought I was doing.

But that question, in itself, when asked by a Chinese pancake chef named Louis, was enough to make Grant and his friends call an end to their diversion.

I was curled up on my side, cupping my nuts, while the sleeve of my black Orwells T-shirt adhered to some gooey piss stain on Grasshopper Jungle’s asphalt.

Grant and the Hoover Boys left, and Louis, apparently satisfied with the lack of an answer to his rhetorical question about what we boys thought we were doing, shut the door.

For a moment, I found myself wondering, too, why guys like Grant Wallace, who called guys like me and Robby Brees faggots , always seemed to take pleasure in removing the trousers of littler guys.

That would be a good question for the books, I thought.

THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR SPAM

“ARE YOU HURT?”

“Balls. Knee. Boxers.”

“Oh. Um.”

“There’s blood on your Spam.”

“Shit.”

GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME

ROBBY FELT BAD,not because of his bloody nose. Because he blamed himself when things like this happened. He cried a little, and that made me sad.

We recovered.

History shows, after things like that, you either get up and have a cigarette, in your socks, with your bloody friend, or you don’t.

Since it wasn’t time for Robby and me to die, we decided to have a smoke.

I believe Andrzej Szczerba would have wanted a smoke when he pulled himself, bloodied, up from the wreckage in that snowy field in Poland.

There are as many theories on how to deal with a bloody nose as there are ears of corn in all the combined silos of Iowa.

Robby’s approach was artistic.

Propping himself dog-like on his hands and knees, he hung his head down, depositing thick crimson coins of blood from his nostrils and simultaneously puffing a cigarette, while he drip-drip-dripped a pointillist message on the blacktop: GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME

I watched and smoked and wondered how our shoes and skateboards were getting along, up there on the roof.

Unfortunately, as funny as it was to both of us, Robby stopped bleeding after forming the second A, so he only got as far as GRANT WA

“Nobody’s going to know what that means,” I said.

“I should have used lowercase.”

“Lowercase does use less blood. And a smaller font. Everyone knows that.”

“Maybe you should punch me again.”

I realized I’d never punched anyone in my life.

“I don’t think so, Robby. You got any quarters on you?”

“Why?”

“Let’s go throw our shirts in the laundry place. You need to learn how to use those things anyway.”

So Robby and I limped around to the front of the mall and went inside Ealing Coin Wash Launderette, where, maximizing the return on our investment, we not only washed our T-shirts, but the socks we had on as well.