Kool Brother Rat
By Jon Sindell
Copyright 2007 Jon Sindell
In this story by the author of The Mighty Roman, first published in The Write Stuff, a thirteen–year–old younger brother searches for cool in the Wonder Years era.
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How cool, at thirteen, was my cool big brother, dubbed “Kool King Rat” by his cool-kid friends for his lucrative business selling Kool cigarettes behind the boys’ bathroom a la shrewd King Rat of the prison camp film? So cool that when he and his friends played department store ditch in the May Company, my bro had the brass to hide in a pallet of pillows near the basement loading dock where he was nabbed – though not before setting the all-time record for longest time hiding without being found, mind you – by a six-foot-four-inch security guard with a handlebar `stache and an Eastwood sneer who said these very words as he kicked my bro out with a pointed cowboy boot to the butt: “If you ever set foot in my shop again, I’ll kick your sweet ass back to Kalamazoo!” Though this was L.A. and no one knew where Kalamazoo was, “I’ll kick your sweet ass back to Kalamazoo!” became the catch-phrase for my cool big bro and his friends that year.
How undeniably cool was my bro at thirteen? So cool that he personally invented rooftop mountaineering, the object of which was to climb atop Jerry Weinberg’s house at one end of the block and cross all the way to the Bartletts’ house at the other end without setting foot on the ground. To do this you had to step or jump from rooftop to rooftop, or swing yourself across from a tree-branch. Legend had it that my brother and Eddie Elsbree had spied Mr. Krieger, the eighth grade math teacher, smoking grass in his yard while sitting cross-legged and listening to Dylan.
How supremely cool was my bro at thirteen? So cool that he rigged a triple spy-mirror system which allowed him to look out our bedroom door, down the hall, and into our parents’ room to watch The Tonight Show long after bedtime. He’d made a rudimentary listening device with an amplifier and a lamp shade, and was able to enjoy three months’ worth of Johnny Carson’s monologues until Dad discovered the mirrors while Mom was undressing for midnight mirth. Hiii-yo!
How cool, in contrast, wasn’t I at thirteen? So uncool that I had earned an “excellent” in citizenship in every grade from first through seventh, and was recklessly heading for the honor roll with a month left in eighth grade. So uncool that when my mom complained to our next door neighbor over coffee that kids these days were so out of control she had sprouted a patch of premature gray, she hastened to pat my head and add, “I don’t mean you of course, honey,” as she took sugar from the bowl I was holding like a proper English butler. I was so uncool that when a bunch of us went to a birthday sleepover at the apartment of Rick De Leon, the undisputed hellion king of our old elementary school, I was one of the kids too scared to follow Rick down into the excavated construction site at the corner after midnight, and then had to spend half the night listening to Rick and Marcus Burgess talking about how cool–“Cool!”–it had been to climb up onto the steam shovel in the dark of night. How cool, in short, was I not at thirteen? So painfully uncool that I would have tried anything, with childhood fading, to claim my birthright as a red-blooded, hell-raising, All-American bad boy in the storied tradition of my cool big brother and his cigarette-sneaking, Playboy-peeking, shoplifting, rock-throwing, trespassing pals.
But first I needed a partner in crime. The logical choice was my best friend, Morty, who had always been my right hand man. When I had decided to start a humor magazine in the mold of Mad in sixth grade, Morty had created a teacher-baiting cartoon character named RatPuss who used mind control to make the principal’s hair fall out; we got detention when a copy found its way into the hands of our balding principal. And when I launched an I Hate The Brady Bunch anti-fan club at the start of eighth grade, it was Morty who had put together an ironic party featuring Monkees records, Cheese Whiz on Wonder Bread, Jello, and a mandatory dress code of bell bottoms and vests. The party–ironically–only harmed my stunted rep for coolness when two girls who didn’t get the joke spread tales at school of my “really neat” Brady Bunch party. No matter: Morty was my man.
“But why?” Morty asked, peering through black horned rims as I explained rooftop mountaineering. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s to get, man?
“The angle, Steiny, the ironic perspective. What are you after? A subversive glimpse into the banal private lives of the middle class? Something Warholesque, perhaps?” Uh oh. Morty was getting way too excited. He was rubbing his palms together just like he had when he got the idea of us running laps in P.E. shackled at the ankles by chains; naturally his cherished irony was lost on our Neanderthal gym coach, who took an instant and enduring dislike to the two of us which meant nothing to Morty but meant something to me, since it cost me any shot at playing in the Mission Bell football game. “Maybe we should take pictures of the yards from the rooftops, all those manicured little yards with their identical green lawns, and make a collage! Or drop Campbell’s soup cans into the yards!”
“Morty, you don’t get this! There’s nothing fancy about it. It’s just good old American boy stuff. Huck Finn stuff.”
“Huck Finn boy stuff?” Morty squinted. He really was trying to understand.
“Yes, Morty. Jesus, man, it’s a rite of passage. We’re supposed to do stuff like this.”
“Like Huck Finn?”
“Exactly! That’s exactly what we’re supposed to do. C’mon, man, it’ll grow hair on your chest.” I was not thinking of chest hair, however, but the precocious goatee Kool King Rat had grown at thirteen.
Morty cocked his head and grinned. The idea evidently struck him as so straight over-the-top that it went beyond irony into a whole new realm of cool. “Alright. I’ll do it! I’ll do your Huck Finn boy stuff!” So we started down the block towards Jerry Weinberg’s house. My brother was across the street, shooting the breeze with Ollie Wirtz and a couple other guys who were working under the hood of Ollie’s Camaro. He was looking our way, but Morty and I were as invisible to him as we always had been. Fine. Further down the block, Mrs. Jordan, whose pretty face and soft curves had of late begun to stir something wiggly in me, was looking for her lost cat in the bushes. Across the street, Susie Margolis was making drip candles in the shade of her front porch. Did I say Susie? I mean, Susie! Susie! The angel-faced brainiac whom we had all sensed throughout elementary school was years ahead of us in knowledge and wisdom, and whose Mona Lisa smile seemed to assure us that we shouldn’t worry so much about our future in the adult world, because she had seen it, and it wasn’t that bad. Susie! Mon cherie amour! Whose long brown hair and oversized wire-frames made her look like a little Gloria Steinem (who, my brother had told me in a conspiratorial whisper at the dinner table, was not just a big women’s libber, but a genuine former Playboy bunny!). Yes, Susie! Who had walked the block for McGovern, made her own tie-dyed shirts, and, most important of all, had given me hope for everlasting happiness by saying recently, “Maybe you’re not such a Neanderthal after all, Steinmetz,” after looking at my black magic peace sign during art class (she didn’t know it was the Mercedes emblem). Ah, Susie. If she knew of the daring exploits I was about to attempt–well, like all girls she was a mystery to me; but I guess I supposed she’d think I was cool.
We looked around as we reached the corner, then crept around to the alley behind Jerry Weinberg’s house. The back fence had a three-foot high masonry
bottom topped by wood-framed corrugated plastic. Morty hummed the Mission Impossible theme and we both cracked up. Then we climbed to the top of the fence, and from there were able to get our arms over a corner of the garage and lift ourselves up, though it took every ounce of Gumby-armed Morty’s strength to do it. “You made it!” I told him. He made an elaborate comic pantomime like a commando to indicate our next move, but his wild permed hair, thick glasses, and deadpan expression only made me laugh more. “Stainers!” I cried. Stainers, a sort of purplish-reddish inedible berry that were great for ... staining. Dozens had fallen on the garage. I gathered a handful and crept to the edge of Jerry’s garage and knelt behind the backboard of the basketball set up. I took dead aim at Jerry’s room and–Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! The white walls surrounding his window were now decorated with dozens of purplish starburts.
“It’s like, a tie-dyed house,” Morty marveled.
“Or that psychedelic poster on my brother’s wall,” I grinned.
The next house over was that of Mr. Kleinfeld, an infamous grouch with a grudge against our family. He always refused to give out