candy on Halloween, and my big brother had fixed him one year with textbook execution of the old flaming-paper bag-full-o’-whipped cream trick. So I had to get out of there fast. The problem was, there was a several-foot gap between the Weinberg’s house and the Kleinfeld’s addition.
“Looks like Snake River Canyon,” Morty murmured, looking down at the concrete path far below. We sized up the jump. With a running start, if we planted our feet on the adobe tile on the edge of the Kleinfelds’ addition, we should be able to make the jump with a foot or two to spare. I was scared, I admit–which gave me a thrill as I charged the edge of the garage and flew a few feet in the air. I cleared the edge by an inch, landed in a clump, and looked back at Morty, who seemed a mile away from me now. Morty measured the jump in his mind, then without hesitation took three long strides and launched himself from the edge of the roof with one long arm stretched out like Astaire leaping (Morty had, in fact, taken ballroom dance, and this had given him grace as well as something less desirable–just cause to be punched in the belly by an eighth grade bully). Morty seemed weightless as he hung in the air like Dr. J; he looked, indeed, as if he might float up into the sky like Peter Pan (though he looked more like Pan’s nightshirted John with his thick black-framed glasses). As he sailed through the air–weightless, it seemed–a smile stretched his lips, and his long permed hair flapped in the breeze like Dumbo’s ears; when he came down at last, he spread his arms like a ski jumper landing, then bowed to me with a flourish. “Let’s push on, Robin,” said Morty as I stared at him with my mouth agape.
The next garage over was too far to jump; but I knew from the bedtime lore passed down by my big brother that there was a conveniently situated jacaranda tree spanning the gap. I reached for a friendly branch and swung onto a second branch situated just above the next garage; it snapped, and I tumbled onto the garage–along with a cat which fell into my lap with a shriek.
“You found Pepper!” cried Mrs. Jordan from down below. I had? I had!
“Yes, Mrs. Jordan! I found your cat!”
Mrs. Jordan looked more stirring than ever in her soft white blouse, her blue eyes glowing with joy. She leaned a ladder against the garage, and I clambered down with her scared little kitty. “What did big bad kitty do to you?” purred Mrs. Jordan as I handed Pepper down. Big bad kitty had taken a bite out of Pepper’s flank, evidently, and Pepper had taken refuge in the tree. “I don’t know how to repay you,” Mrs. Jordan told me. I was just thirteen, and I had no idea either. But I learned the answer that night, when she brought a batch of homemade brownies to our door.
“Your little man’s quite the hero,” she told my mom. “Another gold star for Mr. Good Boy,” sneered my eleven year-old sister. I took a quick glance at my big brother, fearing he had heard, dreading the roll of disappointed eyes that would confirm my lingering lack of cool; ah, but he was just reading by the fire–a purloined copy of Playboy behind the covers of his chemistry book, no doubt–so I was spared. The brownies, of course, were yummy, and the unexpected proximity to the lilac-scented Mrs. Jordan was intoxicating–but I had set out to be a daring rogue, more cat burglar than cat-saver, and had failed miserably. I needed to act quickly to prove I was no Boy Scout–to earn, if you will, my merit badge in bad behavior.
So I talked Morty out of a trip to Hollywood to buy the new Fantastic Four that weekend, and talked him into a trip to the neighborhood coffee shop to duplicate some of the restaurant pranks my big brother had often told me about. The first, a mere warm-up, was a gag on the waitress. The coffee shop featured a huge breakfast special: eggs, hashed browns, sausages, toast, and juice for a buck-sixty-nine. When the waitress, a wax-faced gum-cracker named Betty, asked, “What’ll it be?”, I, like my brother before me, said: “Two breakfast specials, please.”
She jotted it down and turned to Morty. “How `bout you, hon?”
Uh oh. This was wrong. She was supposed to turn to go, and then Morty was supposed to call her back and say, “Excuse me, miss. I’ll have two breakfast specials, too.” Then she was supposed to be shocked. She hadn’t heard right. “Excuse me, miss. I said I’ll have two breakfast specials.”
“And I heard you,” she snapped. “Two breakfast specials.” She turned once more to Morty. “What’s yours?”
“Uh, I’ll just have some toast, please.” And off she went.
“Great joke,” said Morty, rolling his eyes. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.” We discreetly eased ourselves into some empty booths nearby, and, well, adjusted things. Then we sat back down, I in front of two huge plates of food, Morty in front of a slice of toasted white bread. I made sure the waitress wasn’t looking, then slid one of the plates across the table to Morty. I bowed my head to eat and heard a sweet familiar voice saying, “You may be due for another upward classification, Steinmetz. Your comment about The Old Man And The Sea Friday was surprisingly perceptive.” It was? I knew I had made a wisecrack in English the day before that had fallen flat, and that the teacher, deluded perhaps by the desperate desire to see an eighth grade boy take literature seriously, had misinterpreted it as a profundity; apparently Susie had, too. “Yes,” she said, sizing me up, “you definitely need to be reclassified as a Cro-Magnon, Steinmetz, with full Modern Man status maybe a year away.” “Cool,” I smiled, my mouth extruding scrambled egg. I stared up at the beneficently smiling Susie, and glanced at her mom and dad, both of whom wore thin wire frames like Susie, and smiled the same knowing smile as she.
“What kind of goddess do you have to be,” I asked Morty as Susie and her parents seated themselves, “to stop and talk to kids– with your parents right there?”
“It is a wonder,” he said. We stole a long look at Susie. She was chatting with her parents, who were listening intently and nodding their heads as if she were their equal. “Her dad’s an English teacher,” said Morty, as if to explain her unnatural comfort level with her parents. “And her mom plays classical piano.”
“She’s an only child,” I mused. “Maybe they feel sorry for her, like they’ve got to listen to her.” We gazed at Susie again. She said something with a grin, and her father threw his head back and laughed. Man, he was putting an act on for her. He shook the salt shaker. The cap, which I had loosened, fell off, and all the salt poured onto his eggs. Unfortunately, that idiot Morty gave out a shriek, and Susie looked back and saw us watching with open mouths. We knew Susie wouldn’t rat us out–she was a kid after all–but she stopped by our booth on her way out to gracefully trace a little circle on my scrambled eggs with a mouth-moistened finger, saying, with movie star cool: “On second thought, Steinmetz, you’re just a Homo Erectus ... at best.” Morty raised his head like a turtle peeking out of its shell; he liked Susie a lot, and no doubt felt embarrassed. “Et tu, Mor-tay?” Susie frowned, and Morty’s head sank beneath her judgment. Susie raised her head up like a proud pony and led her parents out the door.
One more egg laid on the road to true cool. So like Kool King Rat of a few years before, I went behind the thick bushes in the back of our yard to stimulate my thoughts with tobacco– my first cigarette. My first puff of Dad’s Kools. And my first volcanic cough, raising a startled gasp from the secluded spot on the other side of the bushes. It was a girl who had been in the arms of my brother, who gave me his “Thanks a lot, Beaver” stare as the girl straightened her sweater. Fine, lesson learned: Kools were the pits. “I’m goin’a Morty’s,” I muttered as the girl settled back into the weathered love seat. Mrs. Jordan hailed me as I walked past her house. “Oh, Bobby! I heard you won an award at school!” Ollie Wirtz, who’d stood lookout years before while Kool King Rat sold smokes in the schoolyard, looked up from under the hood of his Camaro. I smiled at Mrs. Jordan as if I just hadn’t heard. “What’d you win, Bobby?” she trilled. I shrugged as if I didn’t speak English. “Wha’d you win, kid?” Ollie said with a gleam. I ignored him too and walked on a bit. “The best essay award,” said Mr. Krieger, the math teacher, who was waterin
g his lawn. I lowered my head and hastened my pace. “And the good citizenship medal!” added Mr. Krieger, may he rot in hell. My cheeks flushed at Ollie’s snicker as I hurried away ... coolly hurried.
“Morty,” I pleaded, “it’s time to get real.” I told him all about my latest brainstorm. His negativity was a kick to the gut. “But I don’t want to go shoplifting,” he said, removing my grip from his scarecow arm. “Why not!” I asked. “I don’t know, Steiny. It’s just too non-ironic, I guess.” I looked hard into his eyes. “And I guess I’m just tired of Huck Finn boy stuff.” “Only the roof climbing was Huck Finn stuff, Morty!” I tried to explain how the restaurant pranks were something else entirely, and that shoplifting was a whole new realm of excitement that we owed it to ourselves to try. “You’ve gotta get beyond categories, Morty. Forget whether it’s Huck Finn stuff, or Marvel Comics stuff, or whatever–just do it because you’ve gotta do it, because it’s your destiny to do it.” But he was in his stubborn mood, and it’s no use reasoning with Morty in his stubborn mood. So he rode off on his Sting Ray, and I raced off on mine to