Grasshopper Jungle

Then, in the second semester of eighth grade, I was called in to the headmaster’s office for something I wrote in a book report. Even though the book I read was in Curtis Crane’s library, as well as the Ealing Public Library, apparently nobody other than kids had bothered to read the book until I wrote my report on it.

The book was called The Chocolate War, and the copy I read belonged to my brother, Eric. Mrs. Edith Mitchell, who was the eighth-grade English teacher, assumed the book was about a candy kingdom or something. She probably thought there were magical talking peacocks in the book that shot gumballs and Sugar Babies out of their asses.

But there were teenage boys in the book—Catholic boys—who masturbated.

Boys who attend Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy are not allowed to masturbate.

My father nearly lost his job because I wrote a report on a book that had Catholic boys and masturbation in it.

Pastor Roland Duff, the headmaster at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, was very distraught.

He had the school’s only copy of The Chocolate War resting on his desk when I came to his office.

There, he counseled me about masturbation and Catholicism.

“My fear is that when boys read books such as this,” he said, “they will assume there is nothing at all wrong with masturbation, and may, out of curiosity, attempt to masturbate. In fact, Austin, it is true that masturbation has serious harmful effects. It makes boys spiritually and physically weak.”

The headmaster patted his forehead, which was damp, with a handkerchief that had the Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy logo—a black cross surrounded by a bloodred heart—embroidered on its corner. I wondered if they had prepared him in his religious training for giving teenage boys talks about masturbating.

He went on, “In history, entire armies have been defeated because their soldiers masturbated too frequently. It happened to the Italians in Ethiopia.”

When he said the words too frequently, I wondered if there was some number higher than once or twice per day that would get me off the hook to hell and military failure.

In any event, I hoped he was right. I hoped the bad guys in Afghanistan—where my brother, Eric, whose book got me into trouble, was fighting—were also excessive masturbators like the Italians.

Pastor Roland Duff continued, “Masturbation can also turn boys into homosexuals .”

When he said homosexuals, he waved his hands emphatically like he was shaping a big blob of dough into a homosexual so I could see what he was talking about.

That frightened me, and made me feel ashamed and confused.

Then he called my mother into the office and he talked to her about masturbation, too.

Up until that day, I was certain my mother didn’t know there was such a thing as masturbation.

As I stood there, shifting my weight awkwardly from one foot to the other, Pastor Roland Duff told my mother about the Warning Signs of Masturbation, so she could keep a better watch over me.

Then he sent me home with my mother and suspended me from classes for one day.

When I came back to school, Mrs. Edith Mitchell made all the girls leave the classroom while Pastor Roland Duff explained the guidelines for books we boys were not allowed to read at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. We were no longer permitted to read any books that had masturbation, Catholics, or penises in them. Pastor Roland Duff gave the entire class of boys the same speech he’d given me about masturbation, weakness, and homosexuality.

Once again, he blamed masturbation for Italy losing wars.

That kind of shit never made it into history books, either.

Sometimes, during his speech, he would remark, “As I was explaining to Austin Szerba . . .”

And he would wave his hands as though he were shaping a doughy Austin Szerba in the air, so all the other boys could see what a boy who wrote a book report about masturbation and Catholics looked like.

Then he led the boys in prayer and excused us so Mrs. Edith Mitchell could have a similar talk with the girls.

Robby and I whispered outside that after all that masturbation talk, a cigarette would be nice.

It was the worst day of my life since Eric left home.

Everyone knew that I was the one to blame for all the trouble about masturbating. At Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, you couldn’t hear the name Austin Szerba and not think about masturbating.

I didn’t speak in class again for the rest of the year.

Robby thought it was funny and told me I was brave.

Best friends do that kind of stuff.

When the boys were taken out of the room, I wondered if Mrs. Edith Mitchell was telling the girls about Austin Szerba, and how teenage boys masturbate, or if maybe she had found a book with girls who masturbated in it. Thinking about a book like that made me very horny.

The library was quieter and emptier than usual for a long time after that day.

But when the boys came back into the classroom, Shann deftly slipped a note onto my lap beneath our desks. I thought she was going to tease me about masturbating, but the note said this:

Okay, I’ll admit it, Austin Szerba, you have finally won me over. I read The Chocolate War, too. I love that book. This school is full of shit. Let’s go get a Coke after class and hang out. By the way, I like what you’re wearing today.

I was dressed exactly like every other boy at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

Later that day, Shann Collins and I kissed for the first time.

It happened right after I said to her, “Stupid people should never read books.”

THE DEATH-RAY GUN

AT ONE HOUR before midnight, Shann and I waited inside an old Ford Explorer parked behind the Del Vista Arms. Robby Brees, dressed in a pair of my clean white socks, best Adidas skate shoes, and Titus Andronicus T-shirt, dashed into his apartment to get us more cigarettes and wave, in passing, at his mother.

Events that night were going to set in motion a disaster that would probably wipe out human life on the planet. That night, I was going to say something to Shann I had never said to anyone. I was going to do something I’d never done, and see things I could not understand and never believed existed.

This is history, and it is also the truth.

I sat in the front seat.

Robby refused to chauffeur us around like he was some kind of limo driver, he said, so either Shann or I always had to sit up front with him. This rule increased the degree of difficulty in actually fulfilling my fantasy regarding Shann Collins and Robby’s backseat.

But now, Robby was gone.

“What are you doing?” Shann said as I shimmied my way between the front seats, over the center console where there was still an assortment of cassette tapes that had belonged to Robby’s dad.

I thought what I was doing was obvious enough, so I said, “I’m looking for my death-ray gun.”

“Well, if your ray gun doesn’t look like a pair of Robby’s underwear or socks, it isn’t back here.”

Robby needed to stop accumulating so much laundry this way, but it did keep the floor of his room tidy.

My foot got stuck between the passenger seat and console. My shoe came off. I left it there.

“I’m coming back there with you till Robby comes out.”

“Robby came out in the seventh grade,” Shann said.

A lot of things happened in seventh grade.

“There.” I said, “I’ve never been back here alone with you, Shann. It’s rather sexy.”

I thought using the word rather would make me seem mature and like I was not from Ealing.

“I’ve never heard you say anything like that before, Austin,” she said.

“Rather?”

“No. Sexy,” Shann explained. And she was right about that. I never had spoken about sex with Shann. I was too afraid to.

“Well, it is sexy,” I said. I kicked off my other shoe and scooted myself against her.

I put my arms around Shann. I leaned into her and brought my feet up onto the bench seat. I put my lips on her neck and licked her. She gasped.

“Shann, I want to tell you that I’m in love with you. I love you, Shann.”

I had never said that before, either.

“Oh, Austin. I love you.”

It was the first time Shann said it, too.

Then the dome light in the Explorer blinked on. Robby opened the driver’s door.

“You are not having sex in my car—on top of my clothes!” Robby said.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but the basketball shorts I’d been wearing that day were halfway down to my knees.

“Um. No. Robby. No.”

Shann coughed nervously and straightened up, while I pulled my shorts back over my hips.

“One of you,” Robby said sternly, “up front now. Let’s go get our shit.”

I squeezed my way back into the front seat.

Robby gave me an intense, scolding stare.

He shook his head and laughed at me. Robby wasn’t angry. Robby was as shocked as I was. He and I both knew what probably would have happened if he had waited about one more minute before coming back to the car.

I extracted my shoe from the center console. Somehow my socks had come off, too. I tried to find them. Clothing has a way of abandoning ship sometimes.

Then Robby dropped a pack of cigarettes in my lap and pushed in the dashboard lighter.

He started the car.

“Light one for me, Porcupine,” he said.

ROBBY COULD HAVE BEEN A PREACHER

WE CASED THE Ealing Mall.

We sat across the street at Stan’s Pizza, where we ate and watched through the window.

Stan’s closed at midnight. Stan was visibly angry that we came in and ordered. There was nobody in the place, and Stan wanted to go home.

I ordered a large Stan-preme in an attempt to cheer Stan up.

“We’ll have a large Stanpreme, please. For here,” I said.

In the same way that Johnny McKeon was proud for coming up with the names Tipsy Cricket Liquors and From Attic to Seller Consignment Store entirely on his own, and just as Dr. Grady McKeon was considered a genius for inventing the brand Pulse-O-Matic®, Stan must have been very pleased with himself for creating the concept of the Stanpreme.

People from Ealing were very creative.

We didn’t know for certain that Stan’s real name was Stan. We never asked him.

Stan was Mexican, so probably not.

We sat, ate, and watched.

Stan watched us.

Everything was dark at the Ealing Mall across the street, except the sign over the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette. The launderette never closed. There was no need to. Between the hours of 2:00 and 6:00 a.m., it was more of a public bathroom, a hash den, or a place to have sex than a launderette, though.

Thinking about having sex on the floor of the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette suddenly made me horny.

Nobody was out there.

This was Ealing at nighttime.

Nobody ever had any reason to be out, unless they were standing on the curb watching their house burn down.

I wondered if Ollie Jungfrau had gone home. Ollie worked at Johnny McKeon’s liquor store. Tipsy Cricket closed at midnight, too, but it was already completely dark by the time Stan scooted the tin pizza disk containing his eponymous creation down on our table by the window.

That was the first time in history anyone from Ealing, Iowa, used the word eponymous. You could get beaten up in Ealing for using words like that.

Just like Robby and I got beaten up for sitting there smoking cigarettes and being queers. But I don’t know if I’m really queer. Just some people think so.

We ate.

Robby asked Stan for three ice waters, please.

Stan was not a happy man.

We couldn’t finish the Stanpreme. It was too big. Stan brought us a box for the three slices we had left on his tin disk.

“Do you think we should make a plan or something?” I asked.

Robby said, “This is Ealing. There’s some kind of prohibition against making plans.”

If we didn’t hate being Lutherans so much, Robby could easily have been a preacher.

NEVER NAME A PIZZA JOINT STAN’S

ROBBY PARKED THE Explorer at the end of Grasshopper Jungle.

He positioned the vehicle facing Kimber Drive, so we could make a quick getaway if we had to.

Like real dynamos.

The pretense of doing something daring and wrong made the rescue of our shoes and skateboards a more thrilling mission to us. Nobody, ultimately, would give a shit about two teenage boys who’d been embarrassed and beaten up by some assholes from Hoover, who climbed up on an insignificant strip mall to get their shoes back.

Shann waited in the backseat.

When we were about ten feet from the car, Robby got an idea.

“Wait,” he said. “We should leave our shoes in the Explorer.”

It made sense, like most of the shit Robby told me. Once we got up on the roof, it would be easier if we didn’t have to carry so much stuff back down. We could wear our roof shoes to make our descent.

It was really good that Grant Wallace and those dipshits didn’t throw our pants up there, too, I thought.

We went back to the car.

Shann was already asleep on top of Robby’s underwear and shit.

We took off our shoes and left them on the front seat.

Robby grabbed his pack of cigarettes and a book of matches and said, “Now we can do this.”

A narrow steel ladder hung about six feet down from the roof ’s edge. It was impossible to reach the bottom of it, so Robby and I rolled the heavy green dumpster across the alley and lined it up below the ladder.

Then we climbed on top of the dumpster in our socks.

I didn’t believe the garbage collectors ever emptied the thing anymore. The dumpster was sticky, and leaked a trail of dribbling fluid that smelled like piss and vomit when we rolled it away from the cinder-block wall beside the pubic-lice-infested couch.

From the top of the dumpster, we could barely reach the lowest rung on the ladder. I gave Robby a boost. His socks, which were actually my socks, felt wet and gooey in the stirrup of my palms.

I felt especially virile doing a pull-up to get myself onto the ladder after him.

Soon, we were up on the roof, where we could stand and look down at the dismal, cancerous sprawl of Ealing.

We lit cigarettes.

Robby said, “You should never name a pizza joint Stan’s .”

We stood, looking directly across Kimber Drive at the yellowed plastic lens that fronted the long fluorescent tubes illuminating the lettered sign for Stan’s Pizza.

Someone had painted an A between the S and T, so the sign read: Satan’s Pizza

People were always doing that to Stan.

They did it so many times that Stan simply gave up on cleaning the paint, and allowed the sign to say what the good people of Ealing wanted it to say:

Satan’s Pizza

People from Ealing had a good sense of humor, too.

“I have seen Pastor Roland Duff eating there,” I said.

“Did he order a Satanpreme ?”

It was difficult to find our shoes and skateboards up on the roof at night. As I had originally theorized, there was plenty of cool shit up there, so Robby and I kept getting distracted. It didn’t matter much, since Shann had fallen asleep, anyway.

We found a plastic flamingo with a long metal spike descending from its ass, so you could stick it in your lawn and fool passersby into thinking that flamingos were indigenous to Iowa.

Robby discovered two bottles of screw-top wine, full and sealed, and he placed them on the roof beside the top of the ladder.

We theorized that maybe back in the days when Ollie was thinner, he may have climbed up here to get drunk and talk to the flamingo. Ollie Jungfrau weighed more than four hundred pounds now.

Satan’s delivered to Tipsy Cricket Liquors.

“Have you ever been drunk, Porcupine?” Robby said.

“No.”

“One of these days, let’s get drunk together.”

“Okay,” I said.

Like considering most things that were against some well-intended list of rules, thinking about getting drunk for the first time with Robby made me feel horny.

We found two round aluminum canisters that had reels of 16 mm film in them. Nobody watched 16 mm movies anymore. There was an old projector at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, but we decided not to take the films, just in case they were pornos or something.

We did want to take the flamingo, though.

Robby placed the plastic pink flamingo next to the bottles of wine.

“One of us can climb down first, then the other can toss down the bird and the wine,” Robby said.

Robby also found a Halloween mask. It was covered in fur and looked like the face of a grimacing lemur. It was the face a lemur in an electric chair would make. That had to come home with us, too, we decided.

“If you ever want to get shot in Ealing, walk through someone’s backyard at night with a lemur mask on,” Robby said.

IF YOU EVER WANT TO GET SHOT IN EALING

WE FINALLY FOUND our shoes and put them on.

I was embarrassed to admit it, but it was kind of emotional for us being reunited with our stuff after that very long day.

I could see how Robby felt the same.

We put our skateboards down with the rest of the things we’d gathered, and then we sat beside the rooftop air ventilation unit to relax and have another cigarette.

“It feels good to have my shoes back,” Robby said.

“If we didn’t find them, I was going to let you have those Adidas of mine.”

“Thanks.”

We both exhaled smoke at the same time.

“Austin?”

“What?”

“Do you realize that today we got beaten up for being queers?”

“I know.”

“But you’re not a queer,” Robby offered.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I apologize.”

“You didn’t do anything, Rob.”

Sometimes, I called him Rob.

“I’ve never done anything,” he said. “I’ve never even been kissed or anything, but I still get beaten up.”

“Shann kisses you all the time.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“I know.”

“Well, if I’m going to get beat up for being queer, at least I’d like to know one time what it feels like to be kissed.”

“Um. I guess you deserve that. You know. Everyone deserves to not feel alone.”

“Can I kiss you, Austin?”

The air suddenly became unbreathably thin.

I thought about it. I shook my head.

“That would be too weird.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

We sat there, smoking.

Everything was shitty and confusing.

Robby felt terrible.

I said, “I guess I would kiss you, Robby.”

“Don’t feel like you have to.”

“I don’t feel that way.”

So Robby Brees, my best friend, and the guy who taught me how to dance so I could set into motion Shann Collins’s falling in love with me, scooted around with his shoulders turned toward mine.

He was nervous.

I was terrified.

I watched him swallow a couple times.

Then Robby placed his cigarette carefully down on the gravel beside his foot. He put his hand behind my neck and kissed me.

He kissed me the way I kiss Shann, but it felt different, intense, scary.

Robby’s tongue tasted like cigarettes when he slid it inside my mouth. I liked the taste, but it made me more confused. Our teeth bumped together. It made a sound like chimes in my head. I never bumped teeth with Shann when I kissed her.

When we finished kissing, Robby pulled his face away and I watched him lick his lips and swallow.

Robby’s eyes were wet, like he was going to cry or something.

He looked away and wiped his eyes.

Robby said, “I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s okay. I said you could. I said let’s do it.”

“Is it okay?”

“I said so, Robby. It was weird. Really. Are you okay?”

“I think that was the best moment of time in my entire life, Austin.” Robby wiped his eyes and said, “Thank you. I’ve wanted to ask you to do that forever.”

“You could have asked me.”

“I didn’t want you to hate me.”

“How could I hate you?”

“For wanting to do that to you.”

“Oh. Well. I am sorry if it was clumsy. I didn’t know if I was supposed to act like the man or the woman.”

Robby picked up his cigarette.

“You weren’t supposed to act at all.”

“Good. Because I’m pretty sure I was just being . . . um . . . Porcupine.”

Robby puffed.

“You know what, Robby?”

“What?”

“If you ever want to get shot in Ealing, do that in someone’s yard at night.”

THE TRAPDOOR

WE SAT THERE without saying anything else until we’d smoked our cigarettes down.

I tried not to think about what Robby and I did.

What Robby and I just did was the only thing I could think about.

If I was confused and torn before going up on the roof with Robby, I was pulp, ready to be spit out by history, after we spent a few minutes there.

I tried to think like we didn’t actually do it, but I could still taste Robby’s mouth in mine. I tried to listen for Shann moving around below us in Grasshopper Jungle, so I wouldn’t hear my mind telling me how it would be all right if Robby asked if he could kiss me again sometime.

It would be thrilling and daring.

After midnight, Ealing is quieter than a stone coffin.

Robby could tell I was confused—tripping out, we would say.

“Are you mad at me?” he said.

“Shit. I’m not mad.”

“Okay. Look.”

I hadn’t been looking at Robby. Until he’d said that, I didn’t even notice that I was staring at my shoelaces, tracing the zigzag path of them up, down, back, forth with the tip of my finger, like a train on a white switchback track, from one shoe to the other, over and over.

Around the loop, crossover, back and forth.

I raised my eyes.

Robby scooted through the gravel away from me.

He had lifted a square metal door in the roof, propped it open. I hadn’t even realized it was there.

“Roof access ladder,” Robby said. “It goes down into the secondhand store.”

“It was left unlocked?” I said.

“Nobody ever comes up here.”

“Up here has a watch-flamingo, and a lemur head.”

“No one wants to mess with shit like that.”

Robby lowered his face down below the rim of the trapdoor.

He said, “Do you want to go down there?”

I had already done something with Robby I never believed I would do. Climbing down inside Johnny McKeon’s secondhand store in the middle of the night was meaningless shit in comparison.

I said, “That would be cool.”

When I stood up, I was dizzy.

I was like the tip of my finger, zigging and zagging from eye to eye, following a string, making history.

Robby watched me get up. I caught his eyes looking at me. I knew we’d never look at each other the same, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I caught him trying to see if I had an erection. I tried to pull my T-shirt down to cover it.

The basketball shorts and boxers I’d been wearing that day revealed yet another strategic flaw for the history books.

History shows that erections happen at the worst possible times, and they stick around until someone else notices them. Often, it is either a librarian or an English teacher, like Mrs. Edith Mitchell.