Grasshopper Jungle Read online

  I do not know what I thought I was doing.

  But that question, in itself, when asked by a Chinese pancake chef named Louis, was enough to make Grant and his friends call an end to their diversion.

  I was curled up on my side, cupping my nuts, while the sleeve of my black Orwells T-shirt adhered to some gooey piss stain on Grasshopper Jungle’s asphalt.

  Grant and the Hoover Boys left, and Louis, apparently satisfied with the lack of an answer to his rhetorical question about what we boys thought we were doing, shut the door.

  For a moment, I found myself wondering, too, why guys like Grant Wallace, who called guys like me and Robby Brees faggots, always seemed to take pleasure in removing the trousers of littler guys.

  That would be a good question for the books, I thought.

  THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR SPAM

  “ARE YOU HURT?”

  “Balls. Knee. Boxers.”

  “Oh. Um.”

  “There’s blood on your Spam.”

  “Shit.”

  GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME

  ROBBY FELT BAD, not because of his bloody nose. Because he blamed himself when things like this happened. He cried a little, and that made me sad.

  We recovered.

  History shows, after things like that, you either get up and have a cigarette, in your socks, with your bloody friend, or you don’t.

  Since it wasn’t time for Robby and me to die, we decided to have a smoke.

  I believe Andrzej Szczerba would have wanted a smoke when he pulled himself, bloodied, up from the wreckage in that snowy field in Poland.

  There are as many theories on how to deal with a bloody nose as there are ears of corn in all the combined silos of Iowa.

  Robby’s approach was artistic.

  Propping himself dog-like on his hands and knees, he hung his head down, depositing thick crimson coins of blood from his nostrils and simultaneously puffing a cigarette, while he drip-drip-dripped a pointillist message on the blacktop: GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME

  I watched and smoked and wondered how our shoes and skateboards were getting along, up there on the roof.

  Unfortunately, as funny as it was to both of us, Robby stopped bleeding after forming the second A, so he only got as far as GRANT WA

  “Nobody’s going to know what that means,” I said.

  “I should have used lowercase.”

  “Lowercase does use less blood. And a smaller font. Everyone knows that.”

  “Maybe you should punch me again.”

  I realized I’d never punched anyone in my life.

  “I don’t think so, Robby. You got any quarters on you?”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s go throw our shirts in the laundry place. You need to learn how to use those things anyway.”

  So Robby and I limped around to the front of the mall and went inside Ealing Coin Wash Launderette, where, maximizing the return on our investment, we not only washed our T-shirts, but the socks we had on as well.

  “This is boring,” Robby observed while we waited for the fifth dime we slotted into the dryer to magically warm the dampness and detergent from our clothes. “No wonder I never come here.”

  “Doesn’t your apartment building have a laundry room?”

  “It’s nasty.”

  “Worse than this?”

  “This? This is like Hawaii, Porcupine. Sitting here with you, barefoot, with no shirts on, watching socks and shit go around.”

  Robby lived alone with his mom in a tiny two-bedroom at a place called the Del Vista Arms, a cheap stucco apartment building only three blocks from Grasshopper Jungle. We walked there, in our damp laundered socks and T-shirts.

  Two of the apartments on Robby’s floor had Pay or Quit notices taped to their doors.

  “Wait here,” he said, and he quietly snuck inside.

  It meant his mother was home. Robby usually didn’t like people to come over when his mom was there. I knew that. He was just going to get the keys to the Ford and take me for a ride, anyway.

  So I waited.

  “The blood didn’t come out of your Spam shirt,” I said.

  We drove west, down Mercantile Street toward my house, and I noticed the diffused brown splotches of post-laundered blood that dotted Robby’s chest. And he was still in his socks, too.

  “I’ll loan you a pair of shoes when we get to my house,” I offered. “Then let’s go get Shann and do something.”

  I glanced over my shoulder and checked out the backseat.

  I wondered if I would ever not be horny, or confused about my horniness, or confused about why I got horny at stuff I wasn’t supposed to get horny at.

  As history is my judge, probably not.

  “I think we should go up on the roof and get our shit back. Tonight, when no one will see us. Those were my best shoes.”

  Actually, those were Robby’s only non-Lutheran-boy school shoes.

  I was willing.

  “I bet there’s some cool shit up on that roof,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. No doubt everyone in Ealing hides their cool shit up on the roof of The Pancake House.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  WHAT MADE THIS COUNTRY GREAT

  ROBBY HAD AN older sister named Sheila.

  Sheila was married and lived with her husband and Robby’s six-year-old nephew in Cedar Falls.

  I had a brother named Eric.

  Eric was in Afghanistan, shooting at people and shit like that.

  As bad as Cedar Falls is, even the Del Vista Arms for that matter, Eric could have gone somewhere better than Afghanistan.

  Both our moms took little blue pills to make them feel not so anxious. My mom took them because of Eric, and Robby’s mom needed pills because when we were in seventh grade, Robby’s dad left and didn’t come back. My dad was a history teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and my mom was a bookkeeper at the Hy-Vee, so we had a house and a dog, and shit like that.

  Hy-Vee sells groceries and shit.

  My parents were predictable and ominous. They also weren’t home yet when Robby and I got there in our still-wet socks and T-shirts.

  “Watch out for dog shit,” I said as we walked across the yard.

  “Austin, you should mow your lawn.”

  “Then it would make the dog shit too easy to see and my dad would tell me to pick it up. So I’d have to mow the lawn and pick up dog shit.”

  “It’s thinking like that that made this country great,” Robby said. “You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden.”

  Thinking about me and Robby going to Sweden made me horny.

  SHANN’S NEW OLD HOUSE

  FIRST THING, NATURALLY: We got food from the kitchen.

  We also made dirt tracks on the floor because socks are notoriously effective when it comes to redistributing filth from sidewalks, lawns, the Del Vista Arms, and Robby’s untidy old Ford Explorer.

  I boiled water, and we took Cups-O-Noodles and Doritos into my room.

  Robby sat on my bed and ate, waiting patiently while I recorded the last little bit of the day’s history in my notebook.

  “Here.” I tossed my cell phone over to the bed. “Call Shann.”

  “Have you ever smelled a Dorito?”

  “Mmmm . . .” I had to think about it. I wrote. “Probably not.”

  “Just checking,” he said, “’Cause they smell like my nephew’s feet.”

  “Why did you smell a six-year-old kid’s feet?”

  “Good question.”

  As usual, Shann got mad because I had Robby call her using my phone, and when she answered, she thought it was me. This, quite naturally, made me horny. But Robby explained to her I was writing, and he told her that something terrible had happened to us. He asked if it would be okay that we came over to her new old house as soon as we finished eating.

  Robby was such a suave communicator when it came to relaying mess
ages to Shann. In fact, I believed it was the biggest component of why she was so much in love with me. Sometimes, I wished I could cut off Robby’s head and attach it to my body, but there were more than a couple things wrong with that idea: First, uncomfortably enough, it kind of made me horny to think about a hybridized Robby/Austin having sex with Shann; and, second, decapitation was a sensitive topic in Ealing.

  Well, anywhere, really. But, in Ealing during the late 1960s there was this weird string of serial murders that went unsolved. And they all involved headlessness.

  History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.

  So, after we finished eating, I outfitted Robby with some clean socks, a Titus Andronicus T-shirt (I changed into an Animal Collective shirt—all my tees are bands), and gave him my nicest pair of Adidas.

  And both of us tried to pretend we didn’t notice my dad’s truck pulling up the drive just as we took off for Shann’s.

  “Perfect timing,” I said.

  Robby answered by pushing in the dashboard cigarette lighter.

  Besides all the head-cutting-off shit that went on fifty years ago, Ealing was also known for Dr. Grady McKeon, founder of McKeon Industries, which, up until about six months ago, employed over half the town’s labor force. Grady McKeon was some kind of scientist, and he made a fortune from defense programs during the Cold War. When the fight against Communism went south on McKeon, the factory retooled and started manufacturing sonic-pulse shower-heads and toothbrushes, which ultimately became far more profitable when made in Malaysia or somewhere like that. So the factory shut down, and that’s also why most of the Ealing strip mall was deserted, and why every time I visited Robby at the Del Vista Arms, there were more and more Pay or Quit notices hanging on doors.

  And that’s a half century of an Iowa town’s history in four sentences.

  Grady McKeon was gone, but his much younger brother still lived and ran businesses in Ealing. Johnny McKeon owned Tipsy Cricket Liquors and the From Attic to Seller thrift store, both of which were big crowd-pleasers at the strip mall.

  Johnny, who was responsible for thinking up the names of those two establishments entirely on his own, was also Shann’s stepfather.

  And Shannon Collins, whom Robby and I called Shann, her mother (the relatively brand-new Mrs. McKeon), and Johnny had just taken ownership of the McKeon House, a decrepit old wooden monstrosity that was on the registry of historic homes in Ealing.

  Well, actually, it was the only historic home in Ealing.

  It took Robby and me two cigarettes to get to Shann’s new old house.

  It had already been a rough day.

  We were going to need another pack.

  GOING SOMEWHERE YOU SHOULDN’T GO

  SHANNON KISSED ME on the lips at the door of her new old house.

  She kissed Robby on the lips, too.

  Shann always kissed Robby on the mouth after she kissed me.

  It made me horny.

  I wondered what she would say if I asked her to have a threesome with us in her new old, unfurnished bedroom.

  I knew what Robby would say.

  Duh.

  I wondered if it made me homosexual to even think about having a threesome with Robby and Shann. And I hated knowing that it would be easier for me to ask Robby to do it than to ask my own girlfriend.

  I felt myself turning red and starting to sweat uncomfortably in my Animal Collective shirt.

  And I realized that for a good three and a half minutes, I stood there at the doorway to a big empty house that smelled like old people’s skin, thinking about three-ways involving my friends.

  So I wondered if that meant I was gay.

  I hadn’t been listening to anything Shann and Robby were talking about, and while I was pondering my sexuality, they were probably thinking about how I was an idiot.

  I might just as well have been a blowup doll.

  These are the things I don’t write down in the history books, but probably should.

  I don’t think any historians ever wrote shit like that.

  “You have to excuse him. He got kneed in the balls.”

  “Huh?”

  Robby nudged me with his shoulder and said it again, louder, because idiots always understand English when you yell it at them: “YOU HAVE TO EXCUSE HIM. HE GOT KNEED IN THE BALLS.”

  Shann put her hand flat on the side of my face, the way that real moms, who don’t take lots of drugs every day, do to little boys they think might be sick. Real moms have sensors or some kind of shit like that in their hands.

  Shann’s mom, Mrs. McKeon, was a real mom. She also used to be a nurse, before she married Johnny McKeon.

  “Are you okay, Austin?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Oh. I’m sorry, Shann. I was kind of tripping out about something.”

  Having a three-way in Sweden with Robby and her was what I was tripping out about.

  But I didn’t tell her.

  Shann’s room was empty.

  The entire house was mostly empty, so our footsteps and voices echoed like sound effects in horror films about three kids who are going somewhere they shouldn’t go.

  Thinking about things like that definitely did not make me horny.

  In fact, just about the only things I noticed in that musty mausoleum of a house were unopened boxes—brand-new ones—containing McKeon Pulse-O-Matic® showerheads and toothbrushes.

  “The moving van’s going to be here this afternoon. They just finished at the house,” Shann explained as the three of us stood awkwardly in her empty, echoey room.

  Because, in an empty bedroom with creaky old wood floors, it is a natural human response to just stand there and shift your weight from foot to foot, and think about sex.

  ROBBY’S VOLCANO

  SHANN AND I started going out with each other in seventh grade.

  When I think about it, a lot of stuff happened to us that year.

  There are nine filled, double-sided-paged volumes of Austin Szerba’s Unexpurgated History of Ealing, Iowa for that year alone.

  That year, Eric went into the Marines and left me at home, brotherless, with our dog named Ingrid, a rusty golden retriever with a real dynamo of an excretory tract.

  People in Ealing use expressions like real dynamo whenever something moves faster than a growing stalk of corn.

  It was also the same year Robby’s dad went to Guatemala to film a documentary about a volcanic eruption. Lots of stuff erupted that year, because Mr. Brees met a woman, got her pregnant, and expatriated to Guatemala.

  And, just like a lot of boys in seventh grade, I started erupting quite frequently then, too.

  A real dynamo.

  And, that year Shannon Collins’s mom moved to Ealing, enrolled her daughter at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy (where we were all good, non-smoking, non-erupting Christians), and married Johnny McKeon, the owner of From Attic to Seller Consignment Store and Tipsy Cricket Liquors.

  And I fell in love with Shann Collins.

  It was a very confusing time. I didn’t realize then, in seventh grade as I was, that the time, and the eruptions, and everything else that happened to me would only keep getting more and more confusing through grades 8, 9, and 10.

  I will tell you how it was I managed to get Shann Collins to fall in love with me, too: My best friend, Robby Brees, taught me how to dance.

  I was infatuated with Shann from the moment I saw her. But, being the new kid at school, and new in Ealing, Shann kept pretty much to herself, especially when it came to such things as eruptive, real dynamo, horny thirteen-year-old boys.

  Robby noticed how deeply smitten I was by Shann, so he selflessly taught me how to dance, just in time for the Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy End-of-Year Mixed-Gender Mixer. Normally, genders were not something that were permitted to mix at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

  So I went over to Robby’s apartment every night for two and a half weeks, and we played vinyl records in his room and he taught me how to dance. This was just after Robb
y and his mother had to move out of their house and into the Del Vista Arms.

  Robby was always the best dancer of any guy I ever knew, and girls like Shann love boys who can dance.

  History does show that boys who dance are far more likely to pass along their genes than boys who don’t.

  Boys who dance are genetic volcanoes.

  It made me feel confused, though, dancing alone with Robby in his bedroom, because it was kind of, well, fun and exceptional, in the same way that smoking cigarettes made me feel horny.

  Seventh grade was also when Robby and I stole a pack of cigarettes from Robby’s mom. By the time we got into tenth grade, Robby’s mom started buying them for us. She might take drugs and not have one of those sensor things in the palm of her hand like real moms do, but Mrs. Brees doesn’t mind when teenage boys smoke cigarettes in her house and dance with each other, alone in the bedroom, and that’s saying something.

  That year, at the end of seventh grade, Robby confessed that he’d rather dance with me than with any girl. He didn’t just mean dance. It was very confusing to me. It made me wonder more about myself, whom I doubted, than about Robby, whom I suppose I love.

  At first, I thought Robby would grow out of it—you know, start erupting like everyone else.

  But there was nothing wrong with Robby’s volcano, and he never did grow out of it.

  So it was at the Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy End-of-Year Mixed-Gender Mixer that Robby casually and bravely walked up to the new girl, Shann Collins, and announced to her:

  “My friend Austin Szerba is shy. That’s him over there. He is good-looking, don’t you think? He’s also a nice guy, he writes poetry, he’s a really fantastic dancer. He would like very much if you would agree to dance with him.”

  And everything, confusing as it was, worked out beautifully for me and Shann and Robby after that.