Processed cheese, p.13
Processed Cheese, page 13
They’d met on the first day of fourth grade at Munch & Crunch Elementary. Their teacher, Miss Gazump, in an effort to demonstrate how much “fun” she was and how much “fun” they were all going to have in the coming year, dismissed the class at the end of the day according to eye color. Blue went first, then brown, green, gray, and finally hazel. That left Farrago and Anagram. They had tried to go out on green and then hazel, but Miss Gazump, after checking their respective irises, had held them back. They didn’t know the color of their eyes. Miss Gazump didn’t know, either. The issue never seemed to have come up before. Finally, after all the other kids with real colors had gone, Miss Gazump squatted down, gave the offending organs an up-close, extended scrutiny. At last she sighed, straightened up, and said, “You two are special. You have miscellaneous eyes.” And with that they were dismissed. They’d been BFFs ever since.
Mothers, of course, were a major topic, online and off. They seemed not so much a wholly different species as an unfortunate, often irritating, sometimes scary mutation of their children, a message from the future: avoid, at all costs, becoming this. Talking about mothers seemed to help ward them (the mothers) and the possibilities off. Two main issues: (1) Who were these creatures, really? and (2) What did they, what could they possibly, want? Hours of conversational fun.
Latest mom bomb: Farrago’s “role model” had been given for her birthday by one of her stupid friends a silver tiara, which she then proceeded to actually wear for an entire week, not just at home but also out in public, to the amusement of strangers and her daughter’s utter mortification.
And Anagram’s mom was somewhere in the middle of an interminable project to redecorate their home from top to bottom, which involved throwing out all the “junk.”
She said she wanted her family to embark on a new “lean, mean” way of life. Anagram’s dog, SpellChecker, had already run off weeks ago, spooked by the near-constant parade of painters, electricians, plumbers, and “living stylists.” Her father, under whatever name he was using that week, had already decamped to a one-room hideaway at the FluorescentLinoleum Inn. Her brother, BatteryCharge, had put his own locks on his door and denied access to all but his most shady friends.
Farrago, at least, had the freedom, sort of, that allowed her to shift from one nutso parent to the other in accordance with the mysterious rotations of their respective mental issues. This week was Carousel’s turn—no crisis, just part of the regular cycle. Farrago had no favorite, really, preferences exhibiting notoriously brief shelf lives. Sometimes one parent was crazy, sometimes the other, sometimes both were crazy at once. There was no predicting their nonsense.
Farrago signed off with Anagram. She had work to do, a dumbass paper for her Old Timey Times class, “Why Color Movies of Today Are So Superior to Antique Black and White.” She’d done her research. She’d collected her examples. She just couldn’t face the huge hassle of dragging a bunch of stupid words outta her brain. Who gives a fuck, anyway?
She refilled the bowl. She sparked up the bubbler. Leaf was a friend. Good and true. Leaf could always be counted on. It knew her. It knew what she liked. It knew where she wanted to go. And it took her there, without fail, each and every time. She liked traveling into the caramel. Where everything sharp and hard became soft and chewy. But even with a prime head on, her homework assignment remained naggingly in view, persistent, hovering. Just far away, so very far away. She’d rather watch her fish. She could stare at them for hours, gliding around in their lighted tank. So bright and smooth and alive. Some were quick. Flashes of cool neon. Some moved sooo slooowly. In no great hurry to go anywhere. That’s because none of the fish were trying to get to any particular place at all. They knew what they were doing. They were making patterns. The fish were talking to one another. They were talking to her. And the message, it wasn’t exactly verbal. It was something directed at the body. Something you knew without thinking. Something private. Fish knowledge. From the time when we, too, were little fishes. This is how the flying-saucer people in outer space communicated. This is how God spoke.
Sometime around there she fell asleep, or passed out, or whatever you want to call it. And when she came to, bad light was blooming behind the window curtains. Oh, shit. She was afraid to look at the clock: 11:11. Oh, God. She was supposed to be handing in her paper right about now. Fuckups like this were the reason she hadn’t already graduated, been released from learning prison. She’d been held back twice, once in third grade and once in seventh. She’d had attendance problems. She’d had grade problems. She’d had attitude problems. She didn’t seem to “get” school. What was the point, exactly? Only reason for the entire system’s existence, as she saw it, was to provide an elaborate babysitting service for parents who weren’t there, weren’t ever going to be there. Who knew what to do with her? So she’d been recycled. Now, with her freedom date from Tip O’ The Wedge High in actual sight, she was in major trouble again. She looked at the clock again. She ran through her options, her lack of options. She sat up quietly in bed for a moment. WTF. She reached for the bubbler. Wake ’n’ Bake time. All hail the leaf.
An hour later she had managed to get into most of her clothes. Same ones as yesterday, natch. But she still couldn’t find her StompYou boots. So she had another couple of hits. Searched around some more. Found missing boots in wastepaper basket. How the fuck had they ever gotten there? She went to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth. She washed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. No consolation there.
She stepped out into the Haunted Hallway. Black walls covered in phosphorescent green ghost stickers to help light your way to the john in the darkest of nights. She paused to listen. House strangely silent. Where the fuck was her mother? Where was the fucking door banging when she needed it? She descended the circular Staircase of Doom into the Free Association Family Space, a large open area decorated in a squeaky cacophony of styles that made no sense to anyone but its wacko architect. The banged-up sticks of mismatched furniture had been painstakingly gathered over the years from random yard sales, not without cost in time, money, and fumigatory annoyance. The whole curious collection presided over by handpicked wall displays of Artworks by JingleBell, metallic fashionings depicting hellish landscapes on imaginary planets. Her mother believed these monstrosities were actually “bee-you-tee-full.” Of course, this was also a woman who tooled about town, to Farrago’s enduring mortification, in a car-size fully operational bright green pickle, the centerpiece of a now defunct ad campaign for the Sons & Daughter Pickle Emporium, purchased at auction several years ago in an appalling, but not uncommon, lapse of parental judgment. “Mom?” she said. No answer. In the kitchen she found a note stuck by turtle magnet to the battered door of the old Cold Comfort refrigerator: “Gone to Porcelain Shebang in Skeeter Hill with CheddarBake and LooseEnd. Jelly beans in bowl on counter. NothingCola in fridge. Have a nice day at school. Love, Maw.”
“What an asshat,” she said. She ate the beans. She drank the cola. Her favorite breakfast, for the last couple of years, anyway. She texted Anagram. Anagram was zoning out in her Consumer Heroes class and wondering where Farrago was. She texted Loophole. He was, surprise surprise, dutifully seated in his assigned chair in CutNPaste class but so freaking buzzed and skittery he was ready to punch Mr. PinchNerve right in his putty clown nose. Mr. PinchNerve was the lord prime of all CutNPaste and easily the most despised teacher at Tip O’ The Wedge. His car had been keyed (numerous times), his desk drawers painted shut, the sleeves of his suit jacket scissored off, and his spare toupee stolen from his briefcase and superglued to the bald bronze head atop the statue of the founder, Old White Guy, that stood outside the front entrance, perpetually blessing apprentice scholars past, present, and future. Loophole was ready to bolt. Where was she?
Loophole had transferred in halfway through the previous year. He’d been kicked out of half a dozen schools in High Falutin Heights for, among other offenses, chewing gum in a no-gum zone, calling his shop teacher a ten-thumbed monkey, throwing corn dodgers at the lunch ladies (yuk, yuk), heckling fellow students in BlushAndGrinSpeech class until the daughter of Principal Wigwam burst into tears and ran from the room, smearing dog shit inside the star quarterback’s jockstrap, fronting a general unpleasant air of all-around Don’tGiveAFuckdom, and, oh, yeah, selling raze to an undercover narc in the senior class and “borrowing” Nurse Budget’s car for a wild joyride that ended in emergency room visits for all participating revelers. What to do? His hapless parents exercised the nuclear option. They moved. And Tip O’ The Wedge, they announced, was to be the very last stop on their son’s erratic educational bus. After that, final destination: the Saint Fiduciary of the Bent Nail Home for Nasty Little Punks. Didn’t sound half bad to Loophole. They had a heated pool.
Loophole and Farrago texted back and forth for a while. Blah, blah, blah. Then Loophole told Farrago to meet him in thirty at the Rock Pile. BackAlley’s Rock Pile was a dark, dorky, smelly den of T-shirts, music memorabilia, and video games down at the west end of the Mess O’ Stuff Mall, right next to the Shellack Shack. BackAlley was from one of those countries where the War had come for a brief visit and had liked the place so much that it decided on a lengthy stayover. So BackAlley bugged out while the bugging out was good. Most of his family had been killed the last time the War had been their guest. He’d left with a suitcase full of spare clothes and an ATM card to his dead uncle’s account in a foreign no-questions-asked bank. The family money wasn’t exactly clean, but then whose was? He’d used most of the funds as seed to finance his dream, this shrine to pop culture in the land that invented pop culture. He could see the hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands and—dare he even contemplate?—the millions rolling toward him, wave after green wave. He and all his castaway relatives finally redeemed from life and released from history. A reality, unfortunately, that never materialized. Location, no doubt, a major issue. But where else was he going to open a store? All he had ever wanted in life was to migrate to a sheltered oasis free of explosions and hot lead, where corruption was on the down low, the air smelled of trees, children played in the grass, and, in the enveloping quiet, he could be quietly stacking. So why not Randomburg (formerly DeficitFalls)? Home to the famous BigBadGorge, which thousands of tourists drove hundreds of miles in order to gawk at. Home to CorrugatedDreams, the nation’s largest manufacturer of cardboard boxes. Two interstate exits from the Mess O’ Stuff Mall, third largest in the world. And only 4.5 miles from the Shuttlecock Indian Casino and Hotel. But most important, the place where that classic golden age musical Painted Clouds (translated into BackAlley’s language as Drippy Sky) had been shot, a film BackAlley happened to see at a very impressionable age on his rich cousin’s giant XoLoTron. He’d never seen a TV screen so big or a movie so real that he thought he’d imagined it himself. Wherein a naive, cash-challenged foreign exchange student from Upper Maxistan travels to Mammoth Country, settles into the postcard perfection of Randomburg (formerly DeficitFalls), here called Goodyville, and naturally gets tangled up in the lives and loves of the adorable SteamGasket family he’s staying with. All the characters smile a lot and burst into catchy song whenever they look at one another for too long. And in spite of the predictable series of comical misadventures (all massively entertaining), our hero ends up fucking all the right good-looking people, founds a wildly successful business making calibrated nibbins, gets elected mayor, and finally marries the achingly available daughter of the wealthiest man in Goodyville in a lavish production number involving most of the population of said town. Afterward, BackAlley couldn’t sleep for a week and his mother scolded his cousin for showing him what she was sure must have been a horror movie. Today he could still sing all the tunes from the sound track and would if you looked at him too long. To Loophole and Farrago, though, he was a cool dude. They liked his accent and the crazy, off-the-dress-code clothes he wore. And he listened to the same music they did. He watched the same TV. Sometimes he even sparked up with them and let them play for free his rare collection of vintage video games. Burro Squash and Kosmic Karnivores and Froggy on Ice. This visit, though, was to make a score. BackAlley also sold beer and leaf out of his car to a select number of personal clients. Guess what? Loophole qualified.
Standing in the hot parking lot behind the mall, staring into the open trunk of BackAlley’s powerful little Zoomzini, as if supposedly gazing upon museum treasures under glass, was not exactly how Farrago wanted to spend these precious few, unexpectedly “free” hours she was certainly going to get punished for. What she wanted to do was just get ultra wasted. As soon as possible. That was the necessity. What happened afterward was optional. Loophole was taking an eternity to button the deal. Talking and talking about nothing and nothing. And BackAlley, of course, was standing quite close to her. Very, very close. This was the downside to BackAlley. He liked to crowd your space. Within minutes of their first meeting Farrago could feel his invisible hand reaching out to touch her where she didn’t want to be touched. She knew without really pulling up the visual that BackAlley wanted to fuck her in a creepy, cuddly, foreign sort of way. This was the sort of transmission from the testosterone zone she tried to ignore as best she could. But frankly, sometimes her nerves got a bit fried. She gave Loophole an elbow tap in the ribs. Finally Loophole handed over the cash. BackAlley handed over the “product.” They left.
“Well, that took forever and a half,” she said as they climbed into Loophole’s XYZ, a muscle car on steroids.
“Whaddya want from me?” He was trying to open the plastic vial of BackAlley’s leaf, which seemed to be secured by an excessive amount of cheap sticky tape.
“Where’s the piece?” she said, rooting around in the glove box, stuffed with old parking tickets, old crinkled maps, old pizza rinds, and an old pair of black panties with a red skull sewn over the crotch. Hers? Probably.
“Under the dash,” he said. “There’s a box.”
She felt around until her fingers located and retrieved a metal first aid kit with a couple of magnets glued to the bottom. “Cool,” she said. “This is new. When’d you get it?”
“I don’t remember.” He still hadn’t gotten the vial open. “Why all these fucking questions?”
“Just curious. I like to know what you do.”
“Well, right now, see, what I’m doing is just trying to get into this fucking lockbox!” Exasperated, he chucked the vial over to her. “Why’s he got to go and wrap it all up like that? It’s like trying to peel a golf ball.”
She passed the opened vial back to him.
“How’d you do that?”
She held up a hand. “Long, sharp nails,” she said.
Piece loaded. Piece lit. And in seconds they were expelling endless plumes of sweet smoke. Hotboxin’ in the parking lot of the Mess O’ Stuff Mall. They watched the people, the stooges, jingling their car keys on the way in, pushing their carts of shiny crap on the way out.
“Look at that fucker,” said Loophole. An elderly man with a cane came hobbling out of the building, stopped, stared out in apparent confusion at the vast glittering field of sunstruck metal and glass. “CurtainCall before the face-lift,” he said. “Probably can’t even remember which row he was in. Or which fucking black camper is his fucking black camper.” Farrago started to laugh. She didn’t want to, but she did.
“Oh, wait, wait, lookee here. Effigy and her pack of grotty rug rats.” Young mother trying to balance two ridiculously overloaded shopping bags between her arms while simultaneously attempting to herd a couple of small, screaming offspring to their car. “Probably ran out of the kids’ Temperall this morning.”
“Stop,” said Farrago, struggling to hold herself in. “I so don’t want to laugh at them.”
“Yes, you do. You know you do. Hey, man, check out this dude. NoName right around the time he got the lead in Galactic Cowhand.” Slender guy in bunny sneakers, torn jeans, and a stained RoadBurn T-shirt. Acne scars and looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks.
Now her laughing machine had started, and once started, she couldn’t stop it.
“Amazing,” said Loophole. “Who’d have thunk it? All these rich celebs shopping at a crappy mall in Randomburg.”
“How’d they even find this shithole?”
“They know bargains when they see ’em.” The laughs kept coming.
“Who’d you take me for when you first spied me?” said Farrago.
“You? Easy peasy. Hiding out there in the back corner of Mr. OlivePit’s Jolly Roger Democracy class hoping no one’ll notice you, hoping you’ll never get called on.”
“Ever again in my whole fucking life.”
“Yeah. You were a dead ringer for MissyMiss.”
“The porn star?”
“The rock star.”
“Before the Algorithms or after?”
“Before, of course. One look and I knew you were a penis paradise. That’s where I wanted to vacay. And I knew I would.”
“So confident,” she said.
“Well. Look at me.”
So she did. Then, without a word, she leaned over and kissed him. Hard. He kissed back. Hard. They mixed syrups. When they pulled apart, they looked at each other again and realized there was no apart.
“Let’s bounce,” said Loophole, turning the key in the ignition, turning to look at her. “Where to?”
“Spin the wheel,” she said.
Loophole was famous for dramatic exits. His signature move. The louder, the faster, the better. They went roaring out of that parking lot, scattering pedestrians, screeching cars, panicked bicyclists, and nearly T-boning a transmission-plagued melon truck.
