Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Hey, Kenny had asked, what are you doing later? And if Newell hadn't known what exactly a Saturday night entailed, he had known that Saturday nights were fun. What kind of fun, what exactly fun consisted of, what it was that made fun so damn fun as opposed to say, neat, or nifty, those were for someone else to worry about. Someone besides the N to the E to the dub to the E to the L to the L. And isn't that the essence of being twelve — being impressionable, blissfully ignorant of ramification? But Newell Ewing was also learning that, often, getting what you asked for meant getting more than what you asked for. He was on the Strip, hell yeah, descending the poorly lit stairwell reserved for employees of the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino and Family Entertainment Emporium, his footsteps resounding on the corrugated metal. Newell took another two steps in one leap, no longer fretting about the way his oversize and unbelted shorts kept slipping below the placement generally acceptable for a homeboy sag, nor the quarter-size nacho stain that his mom would blame him for getting on his fifty-dollar T. The concession stand of overpriced and undernuked cardboard foodstuffs. The arcade of video games that had malfunctioned and eaten his quarters. The rigged carnival games. The barkers who, whenever they'd gone on breaks, had made sure the stuffed bears were attached to the booths with metal hooks, so he couldn't ever snag one. These were behind him now. Oh he was runnin’ with the big dawgs, strutting like a mack daddy, heading for fun of the serious and monumental and three-sixty-degree-slam-dunking variety. Fun that got blacked out by V-chips. The grade-A jollies he not only deserved, but was entitled to. The fun that was supposed to be the whole point of a Saturday night out.

Head start or not, Kenny wasn't about to let his friend get the best of him. His legs were longer than Newell's, and even if his strides were ungainly, he quickly made up ground, pulling even with Newell now, the pair of them running side by side for one, two, three steps down the stairwell. Kenny did not look over at Newell, he did not need to, for he felt his friend's breath rise and fall in syncopation with his, felt their legs moving to the same cadence. Kenny had an inkling to turn toward Newell and smile, but it also seemed that acknowledging the moment would ruin it. Bangs whipped into his eyes but Kenny did not brush them aside. He pushed off a step with his right leg and with an awkward leap pulled ahead — clearing the bottom three stairs, spending one blissful moment suspended, his legs spread wide and bent at the knees, his body pressing forward, feeling graceful and light, released, weightless.

With a thud like a baseball bat against the side of a car, he landed on the small steel platform, his momentum carrying him forward now, propelling him first into the maintenance door, and then into the great hall. Air glittered with nicotine and conversation; it dripped with hope and desperation and designer perfumes. Through the vague and blinking distance, keno ballasts flashed, the digital figures of progressive slot jackpot reader boards were in perpetual motion; the waterfall of coins into metal tins was resonant, continuous, an orchestral hymn.

Meanwhile, halfway across town, a girl sat in an ice cream truck.

If only it were possible to place her in the comic book shop earlier that day, to have her perusing the racks with a combination of fascination and haughtiness, to have her idly flipping through issues whose covers caught her fancy, then checking to see how fast the line was moving. She would have been bored, anxious to blow that metaphorical taco stand, hightail it over to the four-dollar matinee in time to buy popcorn and still make the previews. Absently she would have been fingering some of the stray fringe from where she had cut the sleeves off her Cub Scout shirt. She would have been shifting her slight body's weight from one sunburned sapling of leg to the other, then peeling small, transparent flakes of skin from the meat of her freckled arm, and then yanking on the back hem of her thrift-store skirt; maybe thinking about giving voice to her dissatisfaction with the slowness of the line, or simply plopping down onto the carpet, sitting on her knees and losing herself in one of the illustrated fantasies. She would have been weighing all these options, choosing none of them, simply killing time, her jittery, girlish mannerisms drawing just enough attention to get her noticed.

What can you do? The girl didn't like comic books. Punk Planet was more her speed. The Anarchist Cookbook. Moreover, there's something cosmically wrong with the girl being introduced by way of her location and activity. It is more appropriate to her personality that you meet her through negation, based on precisely where she was not. To wit: the distinction she insisted upon when discussing her skull. Not bald, but shaved. Like a sprinkle of pepper atop an egg, is how she phrased it. Like the blades of grass that certainly will reclaim our scorched earth in the days following Armageddon. The girl was more than happy to explain that the chickens raised at farms owned by Kentucky Fried Chicken had been genetically mutated — did not possess beaks, wings, feet, or feathers and, ergo, did not qualify for the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word chicken. Easily and at the drop of a hat, she'd pontificate on the evils of red meat, dairy products, hormone-affected poultry, pesticide-sprayed fruits, genetically engineered vegetables, sugar or bean products gathered by exploited Central American workers, and any other foods she thought were connected to the worldwide conspiracy. Anyone who cared (and many who did not) had heard the girl with the shaved head explain that she'd pretty much existed on wheat and bottled water for three months now — and wheat was on shaky ground depending on how much she could download about this administration's policies toward corporate farm subsidies, and as for bottled water, two dollars for fucking water? Totally elitist. Another scam.

Can you hear the lilt in her voice? The musical insouciance that coated her doomsayings?

—

They were pissing away their Saturday night. Cruising the road to nowhere. Francesca had picked her up and they had landed in this dented old ice cream truck, which was parked across three spaces of the student lot at Edward W. Clark High School. They were hanging in the back — the girl plus Francesca plus a few others back there, seven or so. Self-proclaimed misfits whose indignation had at some point attracted hers. Like-minded thinkers whose interests extended into different subjects. Blokes who went out of their way to use the word bloke, calling each other at outrageous hours of the night and filling the dead air with whispers, who traded personalized mix tapes culled from hidden tracks on their favorite compact discs, delighted in the fact that the cassette tape was an ancient and disappearing species, and made sure to take special time and effort in their hunts through vintage shops for the forgotten postcard that would have a special, though not overt, significance to the receiver of the tape, thereby serving as that tape's perfect piece of cover art. Who played tag in graveyards and haunted the matinée shows at two-dollar theaters and made out with one another at random when there was nothing else to do, cutting class and sitting on top of their cars in the school parking lot, sneering at anyone who dared walk by, and loudly championing obscure bands because they were obscure, because they were signed to independent labels and run out of some garage and therefore removed from the drive-time prime-time socio-corporate-conspiracy: Be Yourself, Buy Our Product. The latest incarnation of suburban anarchists, their appearances painstakingly vandalized to reflect not an opinion of themselves but of the world; their respective and collective existences devoted to the embrace and celebration and exaltation of any fad, fashion, font, diet, drug, gossip, glyph, golden calf, black magic, method of self-mutilation, chat room signature pic, necromicon, exotic cosmetic accessory, erotic Universal Resource Locator, and/or generalized lifestyle choice that beyond a shadow of doubt proved they were not in league with this fucked-up world.