...first hard acidic rain of the autumn....

                   

First hard acidic rain of the autumn and Patrick is almost sure that he asked his parents permission to have Hale and VonB and Tim over all night to game and watch late night videos on the pornographic Swedish channels Patrick has figured out how to pick up by adjusting the patio set outside Casa McReynolds, tilting the umbrella so that it hunches over on its side in a pensive slouch, bracing the inside of the umbrella with a something Warren concocted in the late seventies during his terse stint with Boeing so that now, once Patrick’s progenitors have toasted one final shot of Jameson’s to the Irish patron saint of sweet dreams and eternal finances, Patrick cagily fondles Warren’s remote control from his throne so to speak and snoops with burglarized tippie-toes to the back window overlooking the lawn, typing in the numerical code into the remote control pad, which, by sheer happenstance also happens top be an amalgamate of Hyacinth Lionowski's phone digits, birth date, the signing of the Magna Carta and last weeks power bowl lottery digits Patrick found on the back of a fortune cookie slip after dining at Wong World on Main street with his parents, Helen chiding Patrick, saying that if the good Lardy would have wanted them to  win the lotto they would have already won it by now and he would just give them the money without her having to waste a hard-earned half-pack of cigarettes dollar on them in the first place.

 

The wind hits the side of Csa McReynolds in waves, rattling the Plexiglas windows in a tambourine-like fashion. Allan has already tried to hang glide off of the roof twice in this windstorm in a Batman outfit, falling to his death in the Flyin' Garcia clan's  trampoline lawn the first time and then being viciously shot at by Harvey Liddle the second, Harvey, shouting out something in German before each shot, telling Allan that if he wanted to kill him, he should have fucking done so in the trenches at Normandy.

 

As is almost now becoming a mathematical given after three prior years of experience, the first week at CLS in October royally blows goats. Ever since appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated Patrick can swear he has never seen Marcellus Buck enter the classroom once this semester, with the exception of the time coach M donned a beret and turtleneck and strutted around the classroom like he was wearing heels, orchestrating his limbs as if standing in front of a string section during Fantasia, conducting a television crew to a desk twice the size of the bar in the Faculty Lounge and Good Time's Billiards which showed Marcellus Buck wearing very thick glasses and a corduroy jacket consisting mainly of tweed and patches, fondling a pipe in his mouth which Coach M insisted was just a unique blend of only the finest natural glaucoma-assuaging herbs and psychedelic spices while brandishing a copy of Ulysses in his hand, upside down, telling Coach M that he can’t deal with this shit in print before being slapped on the wrist by the Coach himself, who keeps explaining to Marcellus that look, this is good P.R. for both you and for the school who, ever since having milked all the pocket change from the congregations tithing palm three times every Sunday for the refurbishment of a new gym which is, in terms of archeology and finesse, what the Coliseum was to ancient Greeks in Rome, our school has been, as you know, monetarily speaking on the rocks and in the shitter.

 

Patrick has not been allowed to even scratch the surface of the gym with his thoroughly tattered pro-wings.  His gym classes are conducted below the oscillating mobile of the Solar system in the seventies gym with some new drill sergeant who refers to Patrick as Susie Rottencrotch and VonBehren as Anita Bitchallthetime. The boys are required to wear the Kelly green short-shorts with stripped socks that stalk up to their legs and offer three different shades of lime around the caps of their knees and a deep green shirt that covers their entire chest and most of their arms. Patrick thought that he would dig the new P.E. instructor at first, given the Sergeants propensity to talk about war in terms of daily conflict, but after four weeks of brutal training, three hundred sit-ups with an egg precariously wedged between their knees so that they can practice astute concentration under enormous physical duress, Patrick remains dubious of both the instructors methodologies as well as his credentials. The time Patrick inquired about maybe going down to the abandoned firing range behind Cedar Brook golf orchard and good times saloon and maybe firing a few rounds at cardboard cutouts of Eric The Red and Aron Prowman, as well as the life size seven foot Marcellus Buck cutout that just appeared folded on the back of a Wheaties box, Sarge Koachout told him to drop down and give him twenty, as in thousand, addressing Patrick solely by his last name, informing him that why the fuck should he be allowed to fire an actual military weapon of destruction with acuity when Patrick keeps misfiring his own pecker in public. Sarge, quoting comments from last year’s spelling bee, and Patrick adamant insistence that he does to know a lot about onanism.

 

The shower situation has also gotten quite a bit uncomfortable lately. After a published one-hundred fifty page report Doctor Kennedy Marshal used as part of her ongoing decade long thesis quest, Patrick was mandated under strict authorization by the school, the church and somehow the federal government that he is under zippo circumstances allowed to take a squirt, pop a squat or most imperatively, shit, shower and shave with/and or in the presence of the varsity elite after Physical Education. This moratorium also included any of the other so called exiled ‘Ostriches’—as doctor Kennedy Marshal defined them in her thesis, who, like the animal, ‘remains with their head, stuck in the ground, their ass perched up in the air, their psyches socially apprehensive of confrontation with students who excel socially and intellectually, students who tower over them and justifiably rules over them, making their formative youth a verifiable living hell” (i.e., see Cheeks, Seymour; The Basket Case: A cultural investigation into the homosexual proclivities of closet adolescent freaks. Simon & Simon, 1969).

Sarge usually likes to push both Patrick and Von Behren until their skin is glistening with sweat and Patrick smells like one of Mike Pierce’s long bearded blood-thirst mead-swigging belligerent dwarves who just survived as cross-over campaign which correlates splendidly to Pierce’s own recent study about the Tigris and the Euphrates and Africa being the nest of all civilization.Both Patrick and VonBehren usually end up sweating the shit right out of them. Hale somehow always manages to run one lap and disappear, pointing to an incoming inquiry from the Coaches Widow on his beeper, meeting Cabbages for a quick you-know-what in the fifties gym before huffing back to the seventies gym to see his two best friends painfully trying to peel their asses off the ground.

Buster, too, because of his obesity and a contract signed last April with the London philharmonic, is expected to dress in the scanty camouflage, but participation is extremely optional. Most of the time Buster just shovels portions of baked beans or tepid chili from a pantry can Mama Marilyn provides him with gratis. Lately Buster has been staring into sheet music, rustling the pages of Gilbert and Sullivan’s the HMS PINAFORE, telling Sarge or anyone who didn’t ask, that he really stole the spotlight in the Stockholm Summer Stock last July, playing the exacting Model of the Modern Major general touting his horn, so his troops will listen, so to say.

 Due to his Headgear Jebediah has great difficulty performing even jumping jacks. After a week of futile military training and Sarge’s look of disgust every time Jebediah would jut onto the court with his Kelly green military shorts wedgied up to the spike protruding off of his scalp, Sarge decided to allow Jebediah to wear a rainbow color Doctor Kennedy Marshal approving leotard and thick, neon pink colored leg warmers and perform remedial one-two head-shoulder-knees-and-toes stretches to early eighties workout muzak and Joannie Greggins conducting at the helm.

Shithead, somehow, gets the whole three periods reserved for Freaks P.E. to pray and help the janitor scrub out crust infested toilets, a job, Patrick heard Coach M. inform knock out student teacher Lillian Wiltz, which is very becoming of him.

 

Lynford Collins was excused from P.E. permanently after arriving to class the first day wearing heels and hoes and a little something he purchased on clearing at Szolds over the weekend. Sarge had to personally excuse himself to go vomit into yesterday’s edition of the Urinal Jar.

 

That leaves DeJuan Shellbye left to sweat waterfalls with Patrick and VonB, while Jebediah is performing thigh-stretches near the record player and Buster is farting to time signatures shielding his eyesight with classical sheet music. Since sixth grade, DeJuan was the eleventh man on the court for the Comets that, as Coach M. explained to him, his duty was to ‘Johnny-Hustle’ copious amounts of water, Gatorade and the occasional shot of Hennessey for Marcellus Buck and to ponderously and with great detail hold down his folding chair, even when Coach M. feels extremely tempting to toss it at one of the referees, players, or visiting cheerleaders who didn’t smile and wink back at him from across the court.

 

After gym, in accordance with the mandate, the boys are not allowed to traverse down the long, heavily trophied central corridor and bathe in the Mens Locker and Clubhouse, which opportunely contains a sauna, whirlpool and cigar and caviar lounge with fresh pampered towels and initialized house coats for the Varsity elite to slip into after practice, pick-up game or tryst. Coach M also put his callous palm up in front of Sarge’s face like a yield sign when he suggested that the three remaining Ostriches use the seventies bathroom, which is heavily tiled with linoleum and has cool mushroom and flower montages and even a vignette of Marcia Brady wearing a CLS uniform and daisy Dukes, waving a palm in one hand and blowing a kiss in the other over one of the toilet stalls. Coach M told Sarge that three-to-four times a week he conducts strict business down in that neck of the woods, henceforth the voice activator and the condom dispenser immediately outside.

 

Patrick, VonB and DeJuan went the first day without bathing, arriving at Lillian Wiltz’ class, surprised to find that, for the first time in two weeks, all of the Varsity elite athletes which, of course, the obvious exception of Buck were in class and had their noses pinched and Lillian Wiltz was passing out a new seating chart devised in the pattern of a parabola which features boy-girl boy-girl seating rotation, Patrick sitting right between Hollis Lyonowski and Karen Pinesol, VonBehren wedged between Latoya and Meredith-Elise. All of the girls, adamantly, pinching their nostrils, waving their palms like a fan in front of their face complaining about the massive amounts of evaporated B.O. Karen even going outside to fetch a spatula-clenched Bev who waddled in the classroom telling Miss Wiltz to talk to the hand, informing her that due to seasonal allergies that flourish in the presence of Patrick A. McReynolds, her daughter is to move ASAP, before she personally shakes her ass and all hell breaks loose.

 

The next day Dejuan produced a bar of soap after gym and the three boys took turns holding down the water knob and scrubbing various portions of their bodies vigorously in the three minutes Sarge gives them to Shit, shower and shave, as he calls it before David Hale, smoking an after-sex cigar and ferrying a cup of Mrs. Looney’s coffee and for inexplicably reasons wearing a housecoat, stopped in front of the water fountain and offered a long-drawn ‘uh’ before asking the boys if they realized that Rev. Morningwood frequently uses that particular water fountain on a weekly basis to urinate in while quoting a sozzeled psalm, after he has had a few, which, since the Faculty lounge hired a party time ex- Wizard of Oz munchkin to keep a well-stocked bar flowing like the river Jordan, is pretty much everyday now.

 

The trinity of Ostriches once again arrive to class with sweat pits and sodden patches blotched on their attire. Karen taps her curved pointer finger into a bottle of Lysol much in the similar fashion as Mrs. Brickenhaur does her Bullhorn.  Bev Pinesol, once again, waddles into the classroom, telling the boys that if they continue to harbor such hygienic deficiencies she has every right to serve them shit wrapped cheese steak for lunch, before telling Ms. Wiltz with her palm that Karen doesn’t attend school to smell rancid, she chooses to attend school to cheerlead and work on her social skills with the opposite sex.

 

The next day, after a grueling three hour stint which included Patrick clambering through an obstacle course while Buster let loose a revised edition of Anchors Away which made Sarge a tad teary eyed that he requested it again and even inquired if Buster played any gigs at the VFW—Patrick, VonBehren and Dejuan decided to take personal hygienic measures into their own sweaty palms and, when Sarge bit down into his whistle and blew out the mandate to shit, shower and shave, granting them to do so in a minute each, Patrick and Dejuan immediately raced outside and hooked up a gnarled very afrocentric phallic oriented fire house Coach M. used for a gag in the faculty follies last year to the hydrant on the corner of Faraday and Starr, ordering VonBehren to spank the back of the fire hydrant hard with the end of the monkey wrench, generating a giant spume which allowed the boys to get thoroughly soaked before VonBehren spanks the fire hydrant from the opposite angle, turning the slightly taupe colored water off, giving them an extra thirty seconds to book ass, through the seventies gym, down corridor central, into Lillian Wiltz’s geometry class where, as always, ostrich tardies mean that they have to perform portions of Euclid’s elements on the board while Ms. Wiltz manicures her nails and excuses the Varsity elite from class.

 

The wind continues to hammer into the side of Casa McReynolds. Allan is seated with the four boys, still attired in his homemade Batman hang-gliding outfit which consists entirely of old DC logo pajama bottoms, a top portion of a sail Warren once won in a raffle and left in the garage to rust covered with one of his mothers afghan’s she swears up and down were brought over from the emerald isle three generations ago.

 

Every Friday the boys' pick one house to spend the night where they will monopolize the entire evening dropping dice, listening to Dave and Tim (whoever runs the campaign) argue over petty details involving Stamina and Charisma, watch Tim incessantly blow up Hale’s characters while making a reference to realism, informing Hale that he shouldn’t have done that boy while Patrick devises copious, near lethal amounts of Super-solvent solution, almost always distilling it with some sort of alcoholic libation he had to filch from under his mother's mattress earlier in the day, when he snagged a few of her smokes from her pocketbook, a vice Patrick himself will tell you is far more conducive for the sweet and innocent state of his soul then CLS.

 

Once Helen tried to place a mousetrap in the case of her Benson and Hedges to booby trap the elf fingers that incessantly seem to walk off with an estimated forty-percent of them weekly. The results were traumatic. Warren, being just laid off from his cutting edge stint at a NASA affiliated branch of the US government twenty-minutes earlier, plus being denied access to the McCarthy Genius grant for reasons having to do with ‘Sincere and apocalyptic genius—the type wont to transmogrify mad scientists into mad cows,’ came home with his office possessions peeking out of an old cardboard box, and immediately poured himself a double on the rocks, and, in the first time since his Nam experiences, decided why the hell not, and reached into Helen’s side desk drawer to grab a smoke and fire one up for old times sake.

 

The results were readily predictable. Warren yelling as Tim would say, ‘bloody-murder,’ not knowing what the fuck sort of animal just snapped out and bit him. Dropping his scotch and yelling at his wife that now his impeccable home row skills are almost permanently in jeopardy. When Helen explained to Warren that the reason she had to place an alarm inside her cigarette pack was because you-know-who enjoys firing one up as much as the next guy, Warren stammered upstairs where ironically Patrick, who had a half-smoked square dangling between his lips at that precise moment, was crouched behind his mattress turned sideways, expecting it to be VonBehren who had planned to ambush, overhearing Hale tell a grossed out Jebediah Noelle that VonBehren witnessed something a little bit too close to home last week during the final squirt gun outing of the summer. Patrick has his super soaker filled with a potent mixture of strawberry dye and stink bomb. The gun is thoroughly cocked and Patrick has learned that the moment he can hear a person enters the room is the most opportune time to fire. As soon as Warren surmounts the last step Patrick turns, telling VonBehren to die, cuntwad!! It’s retribution motherfucker!!! Only to see, moments after he had already fired, a plank image of his father, gauze tightly wrapped around his forefingers in a pending pugilist fashion, midway in sentence holding out his one good paw and telling his son. “Cigarettes, you just quit!” Before his one good office shirt becomes indelibly stained with what looks like bona fide blood. Patrick even firing off a round of Black cats with the currently dangled square in his mouth to make what he thought was VonBehren, sound realistic and Helen, hearing the uproar, rushes upstairs only to faint when she sees her husband’s chest looking as if had just returned from the slaughter house with an axe wedged into his heart. Patrick, still inhaling, holding the Super Soaker, looking into Warren’s disgruntled countenance, trying to explain to him how all is fair in love and war and if he was entering his room which Patrick refers to as a War requiem he should have known by now to holler out Switzerland, indicating his neutrality.

 

Patrick spent the next forty-five minutes with Warren ruthlessly chasing him around the house, knocking over furniture, demanding cigarettes, telling Patrick that for the sake of his son’s own lungs and for the sake of his own personal sanity, his son just quit for life.  Eventually Warren tackled Patrick by the loops on his corduroy trousers and hoisted him upside down, shaking his son profusely, watching as cigarettes rolled out from the insides of his pockets as well as from behind his ears, inside his camouflage coat and even one which was unearthed from a place Warren said he just couldn’t bear to go there with.

 

After Jack hammering his son above the ground and explaining to him over and over again that the only reason he had to physically maul him and almost mentally handicap him was because he loved him, Dave VonB appeared out of the tree house and, having been generously tipped off by David Hale, fired his own super soaker at Patrick who, still exhausted from the chase, wobbled down listless, into his father’s shoelaces, telling his dad that he is in dire need for a smoke as VonBehren pelts Warren with a sweet-n-sour apple concoction. Warren, later, marching, inside, slamming the door shut, telling his wife that she and her son can keep their own damn cigarettes, shouting that it was a good thing he was fired because he really needs a vacation. Ducking after the word fire as one of Harvey Liddles bullets flushes through the side of the house.

 

Patrick took the opportunity then to inquire of his father if he could have the boys over the third Friday of every month to basically just hang out, be very loud rude and obnoxious and make a mess. Warren yelled out fine, do whatever, you’re your mother’s son.

Truths Patrick took to heart.