Character, Driven Read online

  “Artist,” I said, surprising myself. My art dreams had taken a couple bad beatings recently. I guess they hadn’t been beaten totally out of me.

  “That’s a rough road,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore the possibilities. You just need to be prepared. Every artist needs a backup plan. What else can you see yourself doing?”

  “No idea,” I said. Tattoo artist didn’t seem like the right sort of response at the moment.

  “You’re still young. Very young. The universe will send you some suggestions when it’s ready,” Mom said. “For now, how about a cup of tea?”

  “Sounds good.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, out front before first bell, I went right over to Christopher and Brad as soon as I got to school. Robert and Butch were waiting for me at our usual spot. I wasn’t planning to abandon them. I just wanted to spend a minute or two with my new friends before joining my old ones. Later on, I could figure out how to bring the groups together.

  “That was deep stuff,” I said. I’d given yesterday’s conversation a lot of thought. I had some new insights about our place in the universe, and I was eager to unveil them. I was also working up a killer theory about the existence and implications of shared thoughts.

  Brad squinted at me like he wasn’t sure who I was. “What was deep?”

  “Yesterday,” I said. My gut twitched, and I couldn’t help thinking about various Philip K. Dick stories where people discover they aren’t anywhere near the place they think they are, either in space, in time, or in degree of strangeness.

  Brad and Christopher both stared at me, then exchanged glances with each other, as if looking for clues.

  “At the park,” I said.

  “Ohhhh.” Christopher flashed me a goofy grin. “Yesterday?”

  “Yeah, yesterday. After school.” I backed off a step, wondering whether my initial fear of being the victim of a practical joke wasn’t all that paranoid, after all.

  “My brother got me some killer weed from his pal in Colorado,” Christopher said. “Brad and I hit it pretty hard right after school. I think it might have been dusted with something. We were like so stoned, I felt like I was tripping.”

  “Totally awesome. I was really spaced,” Brad said. “I had ants marching across everything I saw. But they were cute ants. They had big heads with nice smiles. They were wearing top hats. And they smelled like strawberries.”

  “Mmmmm … Pie…” Christopher said.

  “Yeah, pie…” Brad said.

  They lost interest in me. I slipped away as my fantasy of deep conversations, loyal friendships, and late-night pie at the diner drifted into dying wisps of killer bong smoke. It looked like we’d done the opposite of having the same idea. We hadn’t even had the same conversation or experience.

  I joined Robert and Butch.

  “What were you talking to them about?” Butch asked.

  “Nothing.”

  I guess something in my voice said end of discussion, because they let it go.

  The bell rang. I headed in for class, as numb as a guy who’d toked some killer weed. I drifted through the school day like I was watching it on the small, blurry display of a cheap phone.

  Midterminal

  THAT NIGHT, AS I lay awake in bed, a dangerous notion seeped up from the darkness of my thoughts: Maybe Nola had the right idea. She’d just gone about it wrong. It must have been hell for her parents to sit in the hospital, knowing her body was alive but her brain was dead.

  I’d never do that to my mom. The thought of her keeping vigil over my shell, waiting for the miracle of reanimated brain functions, tore me up. So pills were out. We didn’t have a gun. I could get my hands on one, I guess. That seemed pretty easy. I’m not sure I could pull a trigger when the muzzle was pressed against my temple or jammed in my mouth. I’d probably flinch at the last instant and end up blasting a hole in my cheek or blowing off an ear. Then I’d get stuck with a bandaged head and a nickname like Bang Bang van Gogh. Forget guns.

  I think people screwed up when they tried to hang themselves, too. And it didn’t look like it was a quick or painless way to go.

  Back up.

  Was I really seriously considering killing myself?

  I guess. Sure. Why not? We all die sooner or later. There was some appeal to sooner.

  Back up again.

  Was my life that awful? I looked into the past, at a road filled with bad memories. It was abundantly paved with unpleasant, painful, demoralizing moments, long stretches of loneliness, and no sense of really belonging anywhere.

  What about the good moments?

  I searched through different avenues, followed different branches. Yeah. Happy stuff. It was there. More often, I wasn’t so much happy as what I could best describe as merely not unhappy. I guess, when you sifted through the past, you found what you wanted to find. I could fill a sack of happiness or a box of sorrow. Talk about cherry-picking.

  The road that brought me here, once traveled, was fixed in stone. Or asphalt. Or nobody’s fault. What about the road ahead? They were big on motivational posters in school. HANG IN THERE. IT GETS BETTER.

  Was that really true? Did thirty-year-old guys who’d been miserable in high school feel life had gotten better since then? Probably. At the very least, most of them would own a car. Did forty-year-old women see the traumas of adolescence as a learning experience? Maybe. But there was no promise things would ever get better for me. They sure hadn’t gotten better for my father recently. The world was full of unhappy adults. A slogan isn’t a promise. An affirmation isn’t an assurance. At best, it’s a hypothetical. As was my current line of thought about ending my life. Unless I made a decision to go ahead and die.

  Hypothetically, how would I do it?

  Jump from somewhere? The door at the bottom of the bell tower in Saint Simon’s Church, just two blocks east off the Green, by the library, wasn’t locked. At least, that’s what I’d heard.

  I tried to picture that leap. I’d jumped off a ten- or fifteen-foot cliff once, at a swimming quarry my uncle Steve took me to. I didn’t like how weightlessness tugged at my gut. The bell tower was a lot higher than that. The gut tugging would last much longer. I actually knew enough physics to figure out roughly how long the free fall would take, and to calculate the force of impact. I didn’t know enough anatomy or physiology, on the other hand, to predict the exact effects of that force on a human body, but it would obviously be catastrophic.

  I wondered whether you just bang-splat died when you hit, or if life lingered long enough for you to feel agony and regret. I thought about how I’d felt when I smacked into the floor of the Pit, and tried to multiply that feeling by a thousand. I imagined myself lying on the ground, crushed, shattered, and seeping viscous fluids like a stomped-on grasshopper.

  Ew. I shuddered and considered other means. Poison? That was a gamble. I really didn’t know enough to make the right choice, and I sure didn’t trust the Internet. Carbon monoxide? Could work. Could end with brain damage. Coma. Life support.

  If only we ran on batteries. That would make things simpler.

  Maybe I wasn’t serious. But you probably already figured out what I’d decided, given that this isn’t a ghost story (wouldn’t that suck, after all these pages?) and that we aren’t near the end of the last chapter.

  I accepted the fact that the slow, low-level pain of my quotidian (vocabulary!) existence wasn’t enough to justify, or mandate, a permanent escape at this point in my life. I found it interesting, and somewhat disconcerting, that I could think about all this in such a cold and analytical way. Maybe this was another example, like watching tragedies on the news, where guys were more detached. I wondered what Nola’s last thoughts were as she poured the pills into her hand. What was her mood? Cold? Emotional? Sad? Relieved? Did her hand tremble? Did she cry? Did she swallow the pills one by one, in a methodical march toward oblivion, or choke down a fistfu
l in a desperate plunge from on high? Nobody will ever know.

  Maybe there was something good ahead of me. Maybe even something great. I guess that was the best argument I could think of for staying alive—a mix of anticipation and curiosity, coated with a thin layer of unjustified optimism, a fairly strong dose of cowardice, a reluctance to force someone to stumble upon my corpse, and a seemingly endless talent for imagining ways that I could screw up a suicide attempt and make my life even worse. Not to mention the haunting fear that Dad’s reaction to my death would be to shrug and mutter, I always knew he was a loser. Those reasons would have to do for now.

  Conversation Blossoms

  I’D TRAINED MYSELF not to pause when I walked past Jillian in the Art House. In a way, it was a variation of that trick they teach ice skaters, ballet dancers, and other people who, unlike me, have to spin rapidly for the enjoyment of others. You turn your head, and then the body catches up. If you’ve never noticed this before, it’s pretty cool to watch, once you’re aware of it.

  So, I was walking past Jillian after raiding the supply closet for a fresh canvas. The closet is on the side wall of the room where she sat. I seemed to go through a lot of paint. I’d also developed a habit of misplacing my brushes. As contrived as my crossings were, I never faltered in my steps or paused as I passed the point nearest to the gravitational well of her attraction, where apogee intersected apathy. She’d started a new painting. The background was solid green. The shade she’d picked looked familiar. I was sure I’d seen it in another painting, but I couldn’t quite place it. She was crafting some sort of flower in the upper left. There didn’t seem to be any sketches to guide her. And that was as much as I could see in my brief round-trip passage. I guess this was going to be another arrangement of masterfully wrought, insignificant, unconnected objects.

  I returned to my easel and put up the new canvas. What to paint? I tried to figure out what I wanted to say. People suck? Nothing is what it seems to be? We’re all lonely until we die? Strawberry pie isn’t enough?

  I had a feeling there’d already been ten million paintings expressing those thoughts, along with one hundred million poems. I wanted to create something different and amazing. I walked over to the front window and looked out at the street, hoping to find inspiration. Instead, I found the target of my admiration.

  Reflected in the top center pane of this particular Art House window, Jillian’s translucent profile hovered before my eyes. My breath caught as she touched the unbristled end of her paintbrush against her lips in thought. She cocked her head slightly, nodded as if she’d made a crucial artistic decision, then painted another stroke.

  I studied her bare right shoulder where it emerged from her smock. Did this make me some kind of perv? It’s not like I was peeking through her window, seeing something she didn’t want me to see. I was just admiring the most amazing work of art, and biology, in the room. It was exactly what I would see, unreflected, if I turned around.

  Past her shoulder, I could see her painting. She’d roughed in some petals on her flower. My hands gripped the windowsill as I recognized her subject. Even from this distance, dimly mirrored, the pink and white petals were unmistakable. Jillian wasn’t painting a flower. She was painting cherry blossoms.

  The horror of my musical moment in Government class crashed back over me.

  I gave my love a cherry.…

  Was she intentionally mocking me? Or was it subconscious? Either way, it felt like the hit-and-run driver who’d knocked me down and broken my legs was circling the block for the fun of crushing my heart.

  I watched Jillian for the rest of the period as she painstakingly applied the tiniest wisps of pigment onto the canvas. By the time the bell rang, my back ached from standing immobile, aligned with her reflection, and my fingers ached from clutching the windowsill. I couldn’t tell for sure, but the thing she’d just started painting below the cherries looked a hell of a lot like a chick hatching from an egg. I went over for a closer look after she left. Yeah, it was cherry blossoms, and the outline of a chick.

  I was almost beyond further injury at this point. I imagine that if you get kicked in the crotch after being castrated, it probably doesn’t hurt all that much. It’s hard to get your balls busted when your balls are already in a jar.

  I decided to skip lunch and get started on my painting. I needed to make up for the time I’d lost staring at Jillian. It turned out to be a wasted effort, leaving me empty of ideas and food. There are few things so full of potential and, at the same time, so potentially threatening as a blank canvas. Ten minutes before lunch ended, I bowed to the reality of my own blankness, and went to the cafeteria.

  All they had left was chicken cutlets. Even fresh, they were pretty sketchy. By now, the bottom-of-the-pan survivors were close enough to their nickname of “elephant scabs” that I felt like I’d be violating the Endangered Species Act when I ate one.

  “You’re late,” Jimby said when I got to our table.

  “Mmffff.” I’d already crammed a large bite of cutlet into my mouth on my way there. I chewed, swallowed, then added, “Art.”

  “Safer than music,” Robert said. “Especially when mixed with Government.”

  I glared at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But from the video, it looks like you died a thousand deaths in a hundred seconds.”

  “There’s a video?” I asked.

  “There’s a video of everything,” Butch said.

  “I got one of us wrestling,” Jimby said. “Remember?”

  “Yeah. I remember that.” Jimby loved wrestling. But I’d been a willing participant in that video. I didn’t like knowing that my moment of humiliation had become eternal.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Robert said. “It’s not interesting enough to go viral. Maybe if you’d been hit in the crotch…”

  “I agree,” Butch said. “After I watched it five or six times, I totally lost interest.” She flashed me a just kidding smile. I went back to consuming my elephant scabs and letting my own freshest wound start to scab over. Having real friends—even ones who kidded me—helped a lot.

  * * *

  DINNER WAS TENSE. Dad hadn’t gotten the job. After we ate, he went out for a walk to the corner store. And probably to sneak a cigarette. Supposedly, he quit four or five years ago, but you can’t hide that smell. I’m sure Mom wasn’t fooled, either, but she pretended not to know.

  I asked her something I’d wondered about ever since I stumbled across that old photo. “Why’d you quit the group?”

  “What group?” Mom asked.

  “The one where you played fiddle,” I said. “I saw some old photos, and a newspaper clipping.”

  “Oh, that group. I didn’t quit. We just sort of drifted apart after college.”

  “You didn’t want to play anymore?” I asked.

  “I always want to play,” she said. “Life doesn’t often allow you to indulge yourself.”

  “Maybe someday,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  There was one other question I needed to ask. “Did Dad make you quit the band?” I thought about how much he hated my art. Part of me would derive a twisted sense of relief from knowing his antagonism extended beyond just my ambitions.

  “No. He liked music back then. I used to play the fiddle for him when we were—” She shifted from wherever she was going. “—together.”

  “He doesn’t like music now,” I said.

  “People change,” she said. “We all do. In good ways and bad. That’s part of life.”

  “But why does he hate the idea that I want to be an artist?”

  “It’s not that you want to be an artist,” she said. “It’s that you don’t, in his eyes, want to make a responsible living.”

  “Like he does?” I asked. “He’s a great provider.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. “He’s worked very hard.”

  I heard the front door open. “I’d better get back to my homework,” I said. />
  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, even with Jillian’s agonizingly slow pace, there was no mistake about the identity of her avian subject. It was a chick, recently sprung from an egg. And there were cherry blossoms scattered around one lush, red cherry. She hadn’t sketched anything in first, as she usually did, but was painting the objects cold.

  I was still staring at the canvas when Jillian walked past me and sat on her stool.

  If I was going to be mocked, I wanted to get her to admit it to my face. Not that she was facing me at the moment.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?” she asked, squeezing a dab of alizarin crimson onto her palette.

  I couldn’t think of the right why version of my question.

  Why …

  … are you mocking me?

  … are you turning that song into a painting?

  … do I keep discovering new ways in which life can suck?

  I pointed at the canvas. “That’s from the song.…”

  She nodded. I wanted to stroke her hair. Or sniff it. I was getting seriously worried about my urges.

  “You took it well,” she said.

  “Huh?” The unexpected statement didn’t immediately register in my mind. Had she just praised me?

  “I could see you wanted to play something else from the record. It must have been hard, standing there while everyone laughed at the song.”

  “Not everyone,” I said.

  “Not everyone,” she said.

  I chewed on that for a bit, then digested it. To my amazement, I wasn’t the one who ended the silence.

  She tapped her canvas, between the blossoms and the chick. “So, if you were painting this, what would be happening?”

  The change in direction nearly spun me out of the conversation. I hadn’t expected anything resembling social discourse with Jillian. My whole planless plan seemed to have been to get her to admit she’d been mocking me. Though I have no idea what purpose that would have served, other than to justify my indignation.

  Jimby’s words came back to me.

  “Then I’d let her hit me with the ax.”