Palo Alto Stories

This is Brent’s joke: “What’s the difference between a faggot and shit?” I didn’t know the answer. “Nothing, you fucking faggot.” He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn. I didn’t fall, but everyone thought it was fu

Brent says I’m a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year. I asked him about it and that’s when we had our first little scene.

“You think I’m a fag because I quit the team?” I said.

He stopped. He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward. His long face looked surprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.

“You area fucking fag,” he said. He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it. I could see it in his retarded eyes.

“Why do you think that?” I said, and my voice trembled.

“I don’t thinkit, you are!” Then he walked off. It’s weird, but I think it’s because he was going to cry. After that he always called me a faggot.

After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die. He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot. And I couldn’t stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.

I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked. Some people called it the Bat Cave.

“You really want one?” said Barry. Barry was my friend. He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.

“Yes,” I said. “I want one.”

I wanted a gun.

Barry couldn’t get me one, but he knew a guy who could.

“Sheeze, well, okay, but… sheeze, all right, I have to talk to Teague.”

Teague went to Menlo, a private school in the next town. Teague was infamous. Barry knew him because Barry went to Menlo in eighth grade.

Teague was dating a girl named Kate Keller who went to the all-girls school, Castilleja. My mom used to teach there. Kate and Teague fucked all the time, so people said. One time, Barry told me that in eighth grade Teague took Kate to Wayne’s Worldand fingered her during the whole movie. Just watching and working.

Everyone knew that Teague could get guns.

Two days later, on Thursday, Barry came up to me in the cafeteria at brunch. I was in the food line. Barry put his face close to mine, but he wasn’t looking at me. He whispered, “Here it is.”

I looked right at him, but he was looking at the back wall, like he was pretending he wasn’t talking to me.

“What?” I whispered at his big Mormon ear.

“T’s number.”

While he said that he was putting a piece of paper in my hand.

“ Don’tlook now,” he whispered. He still wasn’t looking at me.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” And I put the note in my jacket pocket.

Then it was my turn to order at the food window. I stepped up and said to the woman in the hairnet, “Hi, A

While A

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

“I won’t,” I said. I made sure I was looking right back at his eyes.

He looked at me like he was trying to determine something, but I doubt that he could.

Then he said, “You coming to Battle of the Bands?”

“Yeah,” I said.

At lunch that day I sat with some people, but I didn’t listen to them talk. I kept feeling the crumpled paper in my pocket.

In math class I sat in the back. It was AP Calculus, and I was the youngest in the class. Mr. Case was large and dark and bald. He was the assistant football coach under Coach Peterson, the cock. He looked so thick, like hardened tree sap; his eyes were a little crossed and he had a lazier left eyelid than Brent Baucher. He lived three hours away in a place called Angels Camp, on the way to Lake Tahoe.

Mr. Case drove three hours each morning to be at school, and then drove back after football practice to be with the angels.

I was good at math, but not as good as others. My dad forced me into it, so I had no love for it. I tried to think of the equations on the blackboard like little winking eyes and explosions the way Stephen Dedalus did, but it all just looked like a bunch of work that I didn’t want to do.

I fingered the paper in my pocket, and then I pulled it out. I unfolded it and it was the ripped corner of Barry’s English handout. The typed homework part of it said, “. . . what does George do after Le

There were three nines in Teague’s number and two twos.

After school I sat at a picnic bench and read some Faulkner until about five. Benjy was so retarded, and I loved Quentin. I wanted to stick a knife in my throat, or fuck my sister if I had one, and then jump off a bridge at Harvard. I thought about it for a while, then I called Teague’s number from the pay phone at school.

The number went to a pager, so I paged it to the pay phone. I stood there and waited. Cars drove by on El Camino. No one in those cars knew what was going on over here, on the school campus. A little ways away, in the locker room on the other side of campus, Brent was probably changing, or playing Faggot Looked. Fu

The pay phone rang after five minutes.

“Hello?” the voice said. The voice was nasal, and it sounded angry, but like a teenager’s.

“Hey, it’s Teddy,” I said. “Barry C. gave me this number.”

The voice changed a little. “Hey. Yeah, he told me. So you need that thing?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Yeah, I can help you.” The voice was really relaxed now. It sounded like he was doing something on the other end, like rolling marbles on a table, one by one. Then he said, “Can you meet me Saturday night?”

I told him that was okay. Ordering a gun was like ordering anything, it turned out.

He said we should meet at Cubberley, this closed high school, at midnight on Saturday. I said okay, and then we hung up.

I took my sweatshirt sleeve and rubbed the fingerprints off the phone receiver. And then I ran.

I couldn’t sleep that night. It was like Christmas Eve, but not. It was something dark. I wasn’t going to get or give anything; I was just going to take something away.

The next day was Friday. I was very tired, and I felt like everyone could see the gun shining in my mind, and there were bright flashing words above it that read BRENT BAUCHER.

I sat in Biology and thought about Brent. Protozoa had cilia like the hairs on Brent’s legs. Brent’s cells had all his information coiled into DNA, in every one of those dirty nuclei. I wanted to destroy those cells. Break ’em up like billiard balls and have all that info obliterated. His mitochondrial forehead and his Golgi vesicle pimples, and his dead, void mind, shut down and gone.

Then, after Biology and before English, I passed Brent in the outdoor breezeway.

It was a shock because I had been thinking about him so intensely right before, but it was also a shock because I usually didn’t pass him in the halls. I was usually sure to take routes that kept me away from him.

“What’s up, little bitch?” he said.

I wasn’t smaller than him, I was just weaker. “Fuck you, little bitch,” I said back. But I said it quietly into my shoulder, and after he passed.

But then, behind me, he said, “Did you say something?”

I stopped and turned, and he was walking right at me. I started backing away.

“Did you say something, faggot?” he said.

Then I put my hands in front of my face, but he got through them with his fist, and hit me. I felt his knuckle co