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18 ON THE BLEACHERS
O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches,
I must make amends…
— Janis Joplin
I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first 6 weeks in October,
first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell;
then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each
other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were "going together". I
thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.
I hadn't seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had
apparently gone back to Darnell's for more work—maybe that was part of the
agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer
plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn't see the Fury, but I saw a lot of
Leigh and Arnie… and heard a lot about them " They were a hot item of
school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she saw in him, for heaven's sake;
boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt
friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn't care about either of those
things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought
of their son's extreme case of first love.
One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the
bleachers by the football field, as we had been Tanning to do on the day
Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife—Repperton had indeed been expelled
for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were
currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the
football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1-5, and
Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.
My lunchbag wasn't as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the
knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1-5 was that we were now so far
behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5-0-1) that it would be
impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went
over a cliff.
We sat in the mellow October sunshine—the time for the little spooks in their
bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth's Darth Vader costumes wasn't
far off—munching and not saving too much. Arnie had a devilled egg and
swapped it for one of my cold meatloaf sandwiches. Parents know very little
about the secret lives of their children, I guess. Every Monday since first
grade, Regina Cunningham had put a devilled egg in Arnie's lunchbag, and
every day after we had a meatloaf dinner (which was usually Sunday
suppers), I had a cold meatloaf sandwich in mine. Now I have always hated
cold meatloaf and Arnie has always hated devilled eggs, although I never
saw him turn one down done any other way. And I've often wondered what
our mothers would think if they knew how few of the hundreds of devilled
eggs and dozens of cold meatloaf sandwiches that went into our respective
lunch-sacks had actually been eaten by him for whom each was intended.
I got down to my cookies and Arnie got down to his fig-bars. He glanced
over at me to make sure I was watching and then crammed all six fig-bars
into his mouth at once and crunched down on them. His cheeks puffed out
grotesquely.
"Oh, Jesus, what a gross-out!" I cried.
"Ung-ung-gooth-ung," Arnie replied.
I started to poke my fingers at his sides, where he's always been extremely
ticklish, screaming "Side-noogies! Look out, Arnie, I got side-noogies onya!"
Arnie started to laugh, spraying out little wads of munched-up fig-bars. I
know how obnoxious that must sound, but it was really funny.
"Quit it, Dennith!" Arnie said, his mouth still full of fig-bars.
"What was that? I can't understand you, you fucking barbarian." I kept poking
my fingers at him, giving him what we used to call "side-noogies" when we
were little kids (for some reason now lost in the sands of time), and he kept
wiggling and twisting and laughing.
He swallowed mightily, then belched.
"You're so fucking gross, Cunningham," I said.
"I know." He seemed really pleased by it. Probably was so far as I know,
he'd never pulled the six-fig-bars-at-once trick in front of anyone else. If he
had done it in front of his parents, I figure Regina would have had a kitty and
Michael possibly a brain-haemorrhage.
"What's the most you ever did?" I asked him.
"I did twelve once," he said. "But I thought I was going to choke."
I snorted laughter. "Have you done it for Leigh yet?"
"I'm holding it back for the prom," he said. "I'll give her a few side-noggies
too." We got laughing over that, and I realized how much I missed Arnie
sometimes—I had football, student council, a new girlfriend who would (I
hoped) consent to give me a hand-job before the drive-in season ended. I had
little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted
with herself. Still, it was fun trying.
Even with all of that going on, I had missed Arnie. First there had been
Christine, now there was Leigh and Christine. In that order, I hoped.
"Where is she today?" I asked.
"Sick," he said. "She got her period, and I guess it really hurts."
I raised a set of mental eyebrows. If she was discussing her female problems
with him, they were getting chummy indeed.
"How did you happen to ask her to the football game that day?" I asked. "The
day we played Hidden Hills?"
He laughed. "The only football game I've been to since my sophomore year.
We brought you luck, Dennis."
"You just called her up and asked her to go?"
"I almost didn't. That was the first date I ever had." He glanced over at me
shyly. "I don't think I slept more than two hours the night before. After I
called her up and she said she'd go with me, I was scared to death I'd make
an, asshole of myself, or that Buddy Repperton would show up and want to
fight, or something else would happen."
"You seemed to have everything under control."
"Did I? "He looked pleased. "Well, that's good. But I was scared. She'd talk
to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that.
She joined the chess club even though she wasn't very good… but she's
getting better. I'm teaching her."
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