FictionPress.com - let the words flow
| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
|
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
Happy Families
“Dude, we don’t talk about this,” Kyle warned me in a low voice, shaking his head slowly. “Not until we’re in the car.”
I nodded. With our shaky agreement, we each headed in opposite directions down the main hallway of Appleton North High. He was returning to a metal-working class, and I had a pressing assignment in my science class that I had to return to; something dealing with water flow. As I walked, my mind replayed the events that had led us up to this defining moment in our friendship. I jogged up the sunlit stairs of the main foyer and rounded the banister to my classroom, allowing myself only one whispered “That was fucked up,” before I rejoined my class.
There was also the matter that several years prior, my kindergarten relationship with Laurie Smith, an acknowledged “Daycare Kid”, had ended messily one day, around milk time. Years later, however, Kyle would bodyslam Laurie on a cafeteria table, so take that factor how you will.
Our deep-seeded, toothless animosity would continue through my sophomore year of high school, when auditions for Improvedy, the new improve-comedy troupe, were held. I could tell right off the bat that Kyle What’s-His-Last-Name would make a great addition, and attempted to befriend him by making a stupid joke that ensured his despisement of me for the next year. Also not helping that matter was the fact that Kyle didn’t make the troupe for the sole reason of being a freshman.
We finally got off on the right foot in my junior year when our small friend bases collided during lunch hour, forming a tightly-knit table of outcasts. Especially after we dealt with our shock on 9/11 by cracking jokes about dressing up as airplanes at the New York-themed Homecoming dance, that was a turning point in our relationship.
Our friendship was cemented one night after an Improvedy rehearsal, when Kyle needed a ride and I offered one of my mom’s behalf. As we waited for her to pull up, Kyle got to talking about some event that had transpired on the previous night’s edition of WWF Monday Night Raw. We got to talking about wrestling, and within a minute I was telling him about a tape of infamous Japanese death matches I had recently ordered online. I described the sight of a 400-pound man doing a backflip from five feet in the air onto another man lying sandwiched between two sheets of wood wrapped in barbed wire, and Kyle decided that this was indeed worth reviewing.
“What did you do?” they asked us, genuinely exasperated.
“We just prank called the Suicide Prevention Hotline!” Kyle exclaimed gleefully. The girls simply sighed and shook their heads.
“It was amazing!” I assured them.
“I’m sure it was,” Ali said, trying to restrain her smirk.
“You guys. . .” Liz said and let her sentence trail off. Once, long ago, she had tried to keep some order over our ideas and actions, but now she had realized that this was futile and merely registered her disappointment in us, which she did often.
In Kyle’s case, he needed stability. At the time, he lived with his mother, her live-in boyfriend Kit, and his son Seth. His mother, though well-meaning, had the assertiveness of a can of Diet Pepsi. Kit, by contrast, was a pushy, manipulative creep who, as it turned out later, made his living romancing women under the guise that he was a war veteran and would be a millionaire once his patents came through, moving in with them and taking over their house and finances, all the while dragging his smug, pudgy son with him every step of the way. Kyle’s mother was simply the latest victim. As a potential step-father, Kit was verbally and emotionally abusive, a thief, a liar and a homophobe, all traits which unfortunately seemed genetic.
One particular evening, as Kyle and I were watching a movie in his room, his mother called him into the kitchen for a conference. Meanwhile, Kit stormed into Kyle’s room and gave me a ten minute lecture on what a terrible person Kyle was. Once they were done with this tactic, Kyle and I reconvened and recounted what had happened. Realizing that we’d had been double-teamed, we left his house livid. We arrived at my home, threw a pizza into the oven and marched down to the basement, which had become the retreat for us and my brother, and popped in the most violent wrestling tape I had. Kyle ended up sleeping on our basement couch, which immediately became his bed for the nights when he simply couldn’t sleep at home, that is to say, nearly every night.
As my family and I provided the stability that Kyle and I needed, he provided the chaos that we all needed. On a family level, things had been stagnant in my house for a long time. The near-fundamentalist Christianity which my brother and I had grown up under had gradually mellowed out to “Well, you still need to go to church on Sundays and Wednesdays, but now you can have videogames and cable TV and soda.” The problem was, neither my brother and I really believed what we had been taught any longer, but neither of us really knew how to tell our parents. To top it off, the most diverse friend any of us had brought home was a videogame-obsessed boy whose family was too poor to afford the Ritalin he needed.
Enter Kyle, the Godless queer kid from a broken home. It wasn’t an easy fit at first; when my parents first learned he was gay, they questioned my brother and I to make sure he wasn’t coming on to us or filling our heads with his homosexual propaganda during the long hours we were alone in the basement. When they were finally sure that just hanging around a homo wasn’t going to give their kids ‘the gay’ after all, it seemed to open the floodgates for them. Andrew and I were suddenly able to be much more open with them, they took more of an interest in our friends, and we were given freedoms that were nearly unheard of before, like listening to secular music or watching MTV, even though it was no longer any fun by that time. And these days, my father is an atheist who takes great pleasure in his weekly trips to the local cigar store, my brother has settled upon Satanism, and my mother, while still a Christian, goes to church in a bar.
Though we disliked him, that didn’t stop us from hanging around with him. He had a great house that was always stocked with food and was usually parentless, and he was good for comedy material. Over the year, we mocked his cutting, his acting, his mannerisms, his more memorable quotes (“I stand at the edge of a forest of blackness. . .”), his romantic misadventures with the whore of our school’s theatre, and on one occasion, rubbing a tangerine in his face during lunch.
Even still, we remained friends, and it was ultimately Braatzie who had given us the idea one fateful Thursday night after an emergency Improvedy practice to call the Suicide Prevention Hotline. Kyle and I were just leaving school when we met Braatzie on his way in for a rehearsal.
“Hey guys, looks at this!” he said with a dopey smirk, holding out a SPH leaflet to us. “Someone left that underneath my windshield wiper!”
Kyle and I laughed at the idea of leaving something like this on his car, and also kicked ourselves for not thinking of it first. As our laughter subsided, Braatzie uttered the fateful words, “You guys should totally prank call them.”
To this day, I have no idea if this was simply an idle suggestion, or if the idea had been fermenting in his mind over the 45-second walk from the parking lot into the green room. I’d like to think this was a spur-of-the-moment remark and that he was just as shocked as Kyle and I were by what transpired. At other random times when I’m thinking back over that night, sitting in the parking lot of the People’s Food Co-Op or in front of my computer writing this, I can’t help but imagine that this was an intricate form of revenge for the subtle cruelties we’d inflicted upon him; a way to trap us doing what we’d always gotten away with and gain the upper hand.
Then again, that’s probably giving him too much credit, and he probably just bragged about what he’d started to the wrong person that night.
In any case, our reaction was immediate. “We should!” Kyle proclaimed, looking at me for final approval. Already I could feel my face stretching into a grin.
“What are we going to say?”
Then, after an unremarkable session of the latest wrestling game on the market one night, Kyle and I had switched off my PS2 and were too lazy to turn off the basement TV, so we simply watched the news that was on. The story that happened to come up was of a young girl who had been run over and killed, but had previously decided that she wanted to donate her organs in the event of a tragedy. Kyle chuckled and said, in his best newscaster voice, “She donated her liver to a pancake.”
Realizing how offensive what he had just said was, he turned to gauge my reaction, only to find me laughing. That one comment became the start of what cemented our friendship: A complete and total abandonment of good taste in the name of humor. Looking back, you’d think that a mutual love for grown men throwing each other into barbed wire rigged with explosives would have clued us in to this aspect of each other, but as I stated earlier, it’s all about timing.
Things were going fine until midway through 8th period, when I was told that I was expected in the office. Unsure of what might have happened, I nonchalantly sat down. The school’s police liaison poked his head from out of his office and cordially said to me “Are you Matthew Perry?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answered him in confusion.
“Alright, great, we’ll be with you in a minute, we’re just expecting one more student here. . .” he said, ducking back into his office.
I thought nothing of his comment until a moment later, when Kyle walked into the office. We looked at each other in confusion. My first thought was “What a coincidence. . .”
“Oh, hello Kyle,” the liaison said with an air of familiarity, walking out of his office.
“Hi,” Kyle replied, just as confused as I was .
“If you two will just follow me,” he said and started to walk down another hall, toward the actual principle’s offices.
Kyle and I shot one quick glance at each other. Sometimes, you can tell what a person is thinking just by looking in their eyes. Right then and there, Kyle’s eyes were screaming “Fuck!”
We were led into the office of Associate Principle Yvette Dunlap. Yvette (My friends and I oftentimes punctuating her name with a quick Hitler salute), was fresh from a high school in urban Chicago. As such, she was tough, unforgiving, and always ready to set an example. Months before this, she had suspended our friend Ellen, a very outspoken member of the Gay/Straight Alliance and a very out lesbian, for making homophobic comments during break. She had merely said the word ‘aspirate’, which a passing student had mistaken for ‘ass pirate’. With this incident fresh in our minds, Kyle and I felt like a prisoner must feel shortly before the switch is thrown or the chamber floods with gas.
“How are you, boys?” she asked us cordially, no doubt softening us up for the kill.
“Fine,” we stammered.
“Boys, we received a report earlier today that you two made a prank phone call to the Suicide Prevention Hotline from a school phone last night. Now, since you allegedly used school property this way, we do take that very seriously. Also, be aware that the Suicide Prevention Hotline does record all of their calls. Is there anything you two would like to say about this?”
Kyle and I looked at each other and sighed. At this moment, we could either come clean and accept whatever punishment was doled out to us, or we could risk it and tell the most probable bullshit tale we had ever told, and with no preparation, no getting our stories straight, and no knowledge of how much Ms. Dunlap actually knew.
Of course, we chose option B.
That night at my final Improvedy show, things went perfectly. Every game, including one that we’d been trying to perfect for two years, was a success, there was no audience member that wasn’t short of breath from laughter, their suggestions fit in perfectly for what we needed, and everyone was on top of their game. After the show, Megan Hartman and I, as the two graduating seniors, were especially honored. I felt like the world was mine.
Even Kyle and I had a game or two all to ourselves, due to our ridiculously good chemistry. That night, we improvised to make other people laugh, but that afternoon, we improvised a story to save our academic careers. We told Yvette how Kyle had had an awful day yesterday and he was so depressed, he called the Suicide Prevention Hotline himself, just to talk with someone. As he began to tell them his story, I had found him. He hung up, I took him home and consoled him. He was sorry if calling them from a school phone was against some sort of policy, but at that moment it had seemed like his only option left.
Yvette ate it up, letting Kyle know that if he ever needed anyone to talk to, she was always available. She also thanked me for being such a good friend to Kyle.
We walked out of the office in disbelief at what we had just pulled off. In our eyes, that was a miracle on par with parting the Red Sea, while being mauled by tigers. We looked at each other, neither one of us knowing what to do next.
“Dude, we don’t talk about this,” Kyle warned me in a low voice, shaking his head slowly. “Not until we’re in the car.”
On this particular night, Kyle decided that he needed to replace his broken copy of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, one of the most important musical events in his life, and it was high time that I gave the album a listen, as well. We headed out to the mall, picked up a copy, stopped for gas, and drove around town, sharing the musical awakening I was experiencing. To this day, I can still pick out where I drove as each track played.
By the time we had reached the 12th track, I realized that I had told my parents I was going out to get some soda at the local Piggly Wiggly. Not having a cell phone and not yet brave enough to incur their wrath for breaking curfew, we started heading for Kyle’s home.
“You want your CD?” I asked him.
“No, you listen to it tonight,” he told me as he unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door.
He stepped out, paused for a second and turned around and said to me “By the way, thanks for being my second home.”