Palo Alto Stories

A neighbor’s dog barked, and I took off on my bike with the gun clutched to my chest.

Two weeks later was the Battle of the Bands. There were seven local bands from the various high schools, and I thought it was fu

I went to hear my friend Barry play. Barry was in a band called Headless Tom, I guess after Washington Irving and Mark Twain. Barry’s brother was in the band, with two other pothead Mormons.

Most of the kids there were the alternative crowd from my school and other schools, but there were some jocks there too.

I stood to the side and watched. The gun was heavy in my jacket pocket.

Barry’s band went on third.

Their first song was called “The Quick and the Dead,” because those are the last words in the Mormon Bible. It is a song about friends who have died.

Across the pit I saw Teague swaying like a stalk of wheat. He looked like he was laughing, but I knew that he wasn’t.

Then I saw Brent Baucher. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. It was not his kind of music. He needed his Too $hort, “So You Want to Be a Gangster.”

I saw Mr. Case in the corner, one of the chaperones. It was really late to drive back to Angels Camp.

The next song was a fast song called “Bricklayer.” Everyone got into it, even the jocks, and a small mosh pit formed. I got into it too. In the pit, bodies hit each other and there was sweat. It was tight and hot. I was behind Brent but he didn’t know. I jumped and our bodies collided. And again, in the hot, sweaty circle.

From the side, Mr. Case watched with his crossed eyes.

Jack-O’

I sit in the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s old DeVille. It is night out and cool. Me and Joe, we just sit.

We’re out in front of the Unified Palo Alto School District office, a dead one-story building where old people work. I think of all the boring English teachers I have ever had, and I think they were all born in this building.

We sit here because it’s dark, and there are no lights outside this building. We’re stopped for no reason except that the night is still going and we’re drunk, and who wants to go home, ever, and this spot is as good as any to just sit in the shadows and let life slow.

My window is cracked, just a bit, and the air plays on my forehead. I often think about driving off the side of freeway overpasses, just plunging Grandpa’s old blue boat through the cement guardrail. The sculpted posts crumbling about me and Grandpa’s blue machine: a great moment of metallic explosion and heavy ripping and jerking and then release: a soft, slow dive of arcing color through the windshield, into a hard second of impact, just before the black. What an adventure lies behind one quick turn of the steering wheel. A great screaming, and then, slip away.

Joe and I sit and stare at the wall of the building. The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color. Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gap.

There is not much to talk about with Joe because he’s such a moron. I don’t know what he thinks he is, or why he thinks he exists. I guess in some people’s lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing. In the olden days you were born into it, all decisions made, and you farmed until you died, or cleaned the royal toilets.

I guess they didn’t have toilets. Just stuck their asses out and shat in the moat. But someone had to wash out the hole.

“If you lived in the olden times, what would you do?” I ask Joe.

Joe has to think about it. He is large, and his weight spreads from his belly across the seat, like it was a plastic sack full of liquid, rolling in layers upon itself.

“Which olden times?” he asks, and it’s like a boar’s grunt, a deep thing, from the thick part of his throat.

“Like, King Arthur, with knights and horses.”

Fat-ass thinks. I can hear it, like rust-flaked gears groaning slowly into motion, even smell it, yellow smoke emanating from his skull.

“I’d be the king,” he says.

“You can’t be the king,” I say. “No one is king. That’s like wi

“If I went back, I’d be king. And I’d fuck every virgin in the kingdom.”

“You can’t be king, asshole. You can’t even be duke. The fact that you even said that shows you’re not royalty. You’re a peasant.”

“Whenever people time travel, they go back and they are friends with the king, or they arethe king.”

“Because those are stories. When people tell stories, they’re alwaysabout the king; it’s Aristotle crap. But it’s not real.”

“Neither is time travel.”

“There are very few kings, and you certainly wouldn’t be one of them.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, Joe, you’re an idiot.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I know,” I say. And I am. I am friends with a slug, and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things, just the shit.

“If you were king, I’d kill myself,” I say.

Joe sucks off his cigarette. It looks like the point of a golf tee in his fat, clenched paw.

He looks at me and the blue shadow-smoke drifts over the gate of his teeth like fog over a graveyard.

“Then you better die, mo’fucker, cuz I’m the king round these parts.”

He smiles with rotten teeth like busted shingles, all climbing over each other, and I think, Why don’t you get some braces, motherfucker, and brush those dang things? But I don’t really think about that too much because I’m thinking about something else, or at least getting ready to do something else, or already doing…

And before I even know it, or can enjoy the new look on Joe’s face, like a blubbery peekaboo face, so surprised, I’m driving us right toward the vague beige shadow-filled wall, and I can only see and hear Joe’s voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second I’m with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then it’s gone because there’s the metal sound so loud and it’s how I had always pla

I laugh like crazy, a laughter that explodes like popcorn, because he looks so fucking silly, and because my name isn’t even close to Manuel. That’s his brother’s name.

Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan.

But I did paint those swirls, because I drove Grandpa’s car into the wall.

For six months I drove around town with that busted car. The front was smashed. I replaced the lights, but they were crooked and looked in different directions like Peter Falk’s glass eye and real eye. I didn’t care, and the cops didn’t catch me or pull me over. For a while.

I’m at school and when I pass Joe in the breezeway, I say, “Hey, Jack-O’, we doing this thing tonight?” because we’re friends again.