Palo Alto Stories

I was on the ground, and there were a few people watching from far away, but no one came over.

“You are going to be dead before you know it,” I said.

I was surprised I had said that, but I didn’t show that I was surprised.

Brent looked surprised too; his droopy eye opened a little more, and then it went down again and he got evil.

“Are you fucking highright now, faggot?” he said, leaning over me. I was holding my cheek, and maybe even crying a little. I had fallen in an area for plants; there was sharp tanbark under my hand and some shitty juniper bushes.

The people in the distance were just standing and watching.

Then I got loud through my tears. “I’m high on how fucking stupid you are!” I said. “I mean, you are soooo dumb, Too $hort! Brent too short, too dumb, too many pimples, shitface! What a fucking idiot!” I started laughing up at his face. The gun was giving me power, even though I didn’t have it yet. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” I laughed. “It’s, like, why aren’t you dead yet?”

Brent’s dumb face just looked so stupid at that point, and it looked like he was trying to straighten his left eyeball, under the lazy lid, but that he just couldn’t, and I laughed even more because it was twitching. “Hey, twitchy eye, why don’t you just die of being a fucking shitbag?”

I thought this was a pretty good line.

Brent reached down for the front of my shirt, but I curled up into a ball, so he couldn’t grab me. He roared like a boar, long and angry, and then he started stomping on my ribs. Quick, hard stomps. My ribs bent, and my lungs were jolted, and there was a sucking-in sound. I stayed rolled up and he stomped me. Then there were some shouts from afar, and Brent was gone.

On Saturday night I went to get the gun.

Cubberley was a high school that had been shut down two decades before. It was famous because some of the Grateful Dead had gone there forty years ago, but now it was a big empty campus where adult classes met and where children’s sports teams played on the weekends. There were weeds in all the cracks of the arcade floors, and dead vines on the walls. I had been forced to play a lot of sports there when I was younger, so I knew the place well.

I rode my bike there because I was too young to drive. It was about four miles from my house. Teague and I were supposed to meet at the outdoor auditorium. I rode fast and the cold air on my face felt like I was riding through ghosts.

When I got to the school, I walked my bike down the hallway. On the walls, there were light fixtures every so often, which shone faint orange behind thick rippled plastic. They still kept the lights on every night, lighting nothing, for no one.

I walked past the gym, where I had played basketball when I was ten. The double doors had a chain through the handles, and there was a padlock hanging in the center. I had a memory flash of being small, in an oversized jersey, playing badly and hating myself. Then I was at the outdoor theater.

It had a stone stage and a grassy area for the audience. I was at the lip of the grassy part, at the far end from the stage. The moon lit up the place.

I left my bike at the edge of the grass and walked down the small declination toward the stage. The grass came up in uneven patches, and the dew soaked through the top of my black Converses, and through my socks to my feet.

*   *   *

I couldn’t see anyone.

I thought about Brent coming out from the dark and shooting me.

If he knew I wanted to kill him, he would kill me first.

In the old days, you could duel.

Emotions have been around forever.

I wish I had a girlfriend. Or someone.

There was no one. I was in the middle of the grassy area. The stage was there, with its jagged lip of broken stone, looking spiritual in the moonlight.

I felt that weight on me, the weight of stone, and it was familiar. I was weak, and stupid, and wimpy, and I had no opinions, and I was a bad talker, and I didn’t know how to make friends, and I had big ears, and an ugly nose, and my hair was ’fro-y, and my dick, and my stomach, and my mind were all bad.

But then a weird thing happened. While I stood there and waited for my gun, Brent changed a little in my mind. For a second, it seemed like he was just another guy. Brent was ugly, and he had human needs, and he probably had a bunch of disappointments in life. I suppose being so close to the gun, almost having it, made me think about things in a new way. Brent had problems, and he had skin, and he had a mom, and one day he would die too.

If I shot him, it wouldn’t really matter. There would be more people like him. Deer get shot all the time. Deer blood and deer guts all over the forest floor. Blood in the leaves, breathing slowing down. And then gone.

Brent would be forgotten too.

“Hey.”

I turned. There was someone standing in a little alcove in the sidewall of the theater.

He had been watching me. It was Teague. There was cement behind him and above him and he was in shadow so it was hard to see his eyes.

There was another guy on the cement above us, but I couldn’t really see him. I could only tell that he was big and white.

Teague was my height, and handsome. He wore a black parka but I could tell that he was ski

He looked like he was about to laugh, but he didn’t laugh, and because I couldn’t really see his eyes, I was confused about what he was feeling. Maybe nothing.

“Here’s the shit,” said Teague, and he handed me a wrinkled paper bag. He didn’t stop looking at me while I took the bag.

The bag was heavy. I looked inside, and there was a black handgun at the bottom.

“Take it out,” he said.

“Nah, I’m cool,” I said. “Looks good.”

“You don’t want to check it out?” he said.

“Nah, we’re good,” I said. “Three fifty-seven, right?”

“It’s a Glock,” he said. There was a sound from above, like scraping.

“I thought you said a three fifty-seven?”

“Glock’s better,” he said.

“Right, cool,” I said.

“Three-hun,” he told me.

“Oh, right.” I took out a folded envelope from my back pocket and handed it to him. I had been saving for a car.

He counted the money and then put it in his back pocket.

“Nice doing business with you,” he said, and walked out. He met his friend at the end of the grass, and they turned the corner down the hall with the orange lights and were gone.

The bag just looked like a lunch bag, so I carried it casually. I rode my bike home, and the bag swung under my handlebars. I was humming a little bit. Some tune. I saw my hand on my handlebars, gripping the handgrip and the top of the bag. I stopped humming and heard the air all around me, and my bike whirring below.

And you know how you can’t see your face? The closest you can see is the tip of your nose, if you cross your eyes. But I wanted to look at myself right then, to see this guy coasting down the sidewalk with a gun, going somewhere.

Then the bag split and the gun clattered onto the cement. I skidded to a stop and turned around to get it. It was lying on the sidewalk in front of someone’s lawn. A black gun on the sidewalk. It wasn’t metal. It was plastic. It was a squirt gun, full of water. For a second I was sure of it, but no, it was a real gun. I picked it up. I didn’t know how to check if it was okay. There was a button on the side of the grip that I pressed and the clip popped out in my hand. It was heavy and full of bullets.

I popped the clip back in.

Then I pointed the gun at the house I was in front of. It was an Eichler house, low and boxy, with a garage door out front—like my house, but orange and white. I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. There was a loud burst and then the house was there, but even more there because it had just been shot.