The Ashtray Heist
or
How to Come Out to Your Fourth-Best Friend
by Kyle Mustain
We hit the sweet spot of the song right as Zorro’s Brother took Henderson, the busiest street in town. The subwoofer in the back rattled the aluminum frame all the way up to the blockheaded hood of the van, reverberated through the front console, coursed back through the floor to then collide with the next wave of bass emitting from the subwoofer, and they crashed into each other somewhere in the middle, exploding all over Zorro’s Brother, but especially through the springs of the bucket seats and onto our backs.
“Feeelssss liiiike aaaa maaaassaaaagggge chaaaaairrrr, doooesssn’tttt iiiiit?!” I yelled through the sound barrier between us.
“Yeeeaaah, brrrroooothhhherrrrr!” Skutch yelled back, the unharnessed rage of the bass taking him by surprise. I saw him nearly drop the white cylinder of tobacco he held between his double-jointed fingers like my subwoofer had given him early onset arthritis. Regaining the grip on the square and placing it into his mouth, he turned his muzzle to me and beamed, “When in Rome, brother! Yeah!”
This calling people ‘brother’ business and punctuating his statements with ‘Yeah!’ was a recent development. He was trying to sound like his favorite pro wrestlers from TV, tossing out idioms regardless of whether they fit the situation. He now dressed in snowboarder outfits that he ordered out of catalogues (We lived in the central plains of Illinois, nowhere even near a ski resort). He didn’t dress or talk like that two years before. Skutch was more buttoned-up like me back when we used to hang out.
Before the unspeakable night of the duct tape.
This forced hangout of ours was starting off well enough, so I went on and did what came naturally whenever I listened to my favorite band: I gave myself absolutely over to the music. Zorro’s Brother was the perfect vehicle for driving around listening to music. Its steering wheel was loose as hell. I could drum on it with my fingers with no fear of accidentally making the converted box on wheels careen all over the road. There was so much leg room I could practically do a jig from Riverdance. I displayed all of my driver’s seat choreography for Skutch, even doing little turntable glides with my hands along to those points in the remix, gleaming at him with a Kamel Red Light roasting in the corner of my mouth. Seeing how much this cracked him up helped untangle my nerves, just a little.
Then came the part of the song that I knew was coming, but he didn’t. The music halts and a deep voice drops in and says the word, “Annihilate,” but it’s stretched out and modulated, so it sounds like a bad guy from a cartoon like Transformers or G.I. Joe. It’s not just “Annihilate,” it’s “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!” and who knows what it’s supposed to mean other than to drop in from out of nowhere and be fucking awesome.
Skutch cried out, “Oh my God! I love this shit!”
“Dude . . . right?!!!”
Then in some kind of boy-instinct, we whipped our heads to look each other in the eye and shouted in unison, “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!”
We laughed and that felt awesome but the moment passed and it got awkward again. We turned back toward the windshield, back to puffing on our squares. He probably thought this was going well enough, without any idea what my ulterior motive was that afternoon.
If I could only get over that night of the duct tape.
∞
The smoking half of Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream was empty all but for one table with two gray-haired women indulging in post-meal, or perhaps even mid-meal, cigarettes. The nonsmoking half of the restaurant was teeming with marinara-spattered children and their helicoptering parents. Most important to us: The staff was focused on keeping the kids entertained and the parents feeling like they were getting their money’s worth. We stood at the first of the two long tables at the front of the parlor. The premise we came up with back in Zorro’s Brother was that we would pantomime like we were looking for the right spot for the imaginary party we had coming. First we rubbed our chins, then we pointed, spread our arms, shook our heads, “No,” nodded in agreement, and started toward the next table. But before we left, I reached and pocketed the first ashtray from the table and Skutch grabbed the other one.
Skutch started up some nonchalant chatter to accompany the petty larceny we were in the midst of perpetrating: “So I heard you finally quit wrestling.”
“Yeah, I mean, technically I didn’t quit,” I gave a quick look back to the kitchen. A hundred feet away was Allen the manager moving around behind the counter with the black, crescent phone handset tucked between his ear and shoulder while he slid a freshly baked pizza pie off a wooden peel onto the stainless steel cutting table. Allen had a policy of preemptive hostility when it came to teens: A cuss word spoken too loudly or wearing clothes he deemed too baggy was enough to get a whole table full of teens tossed out of his establishment. Preoccupied for the time being, his peering eyes wouldn’t be a problem until we reached the jukebox and salad bar in the middle of the dining room. Trying to maintain a Sunday morning easiness about me, I continued, “It’s not like I walked into Coach Bull’s office, gave him the finger, and told him I quit. I just didn’t show up to practice.”
I nodded him the go-ahead. We smoothly retrieved the next two ashtrays from the second of the two front party tables. Now we started moving along the smaller, four-seater tables set with one ashtray each. At each station we idled for a minute, continuing our pantomime of indecision of where best to seat our forthcoming flood of friends and family, then whoever was closest to an ashtray, gave the eye, and the other turned to give a lookout for Allen.
Skutch continued as if we were doing nothing to arouse concern, “Dude, a lot of wrestlers quit before they hit varsity. I’m glad you figured it out, man,” which was nice of him to offer some friendly reassurance, but he ruined it by adding, “You know what my stance has always been on that sport anyway.” I put on a face like I wasn’t agitated by Skutch’s comment and swiped the closest ashtray.
Skutch always talked trash about the one sport I excelled in. All through junior high, if he was around, I could never brag about my wrestling achievements. While I was spending my nights and weekends busting my ass on the mat, Skutch acted as if none of it counted. He made hacky comments like, Who cares that you won first place at the dry-humping tournament? followed by his mocking laughter, Ahahaha! and looking around the room until he got everyone laughing along with him.
When he made this newest insinuation, I considered making a run for Zorro’s Brother and stranding him there. However, I had a promise to keep with T.J., so I steered us away from this topic. “How’s it been with your parents since you quit football?”
We made our way smoothly now, leapfrogging from table to table, swooping up our little prizes faster than the human eye could see.
“You know my parents, man. What do you think? Not being buddy-buddy with the football team like I used to be annoys the hell out of them. Hanging out at skate parks has opened me up to ‘less than savory folks’ these days. I come home smelling like squares. I even, on occasion, smoke a little reefer.” He said that last part under his breath. Even if there was no one on our side of the restaurant, one had to be careful when mentioning that stuff. He finished, “I’m telling ya, dude, things have definitely changed with me and my folks. ”
Apparently none of our parents were singing our highest praises those days, except for T.J., whose parents pretty much let him raise himself.
“What about your folks?” Skutch cordially passed the question back to me.
“My parents’ve seen too many Disney movies. Every night they make me hold different exotic artifacts and try out different chants in foreign tongues. They’re betting that one of these times I’ll magically switch places with one of my mom’s miscarriages.”
Skutch bent himself in half to slap the table at the booth he was standing next to. This was a sight because he was six-foot-three and cloaked in a double-XL, magenta-colored snowboarding jacket that stuck out like a sore thumb for a region where most men kept their wardrobes to a dull palette. It pissed me off that he could dress as ostentatiously as he wanted while I maintained a strict Gap-and-Abercrombie wardrobe to assert my hetero public persona. When he came up, his hand was over his mouth and he looked at me with watering eyes. Sure, making him lose it like that put the mission at risk, but that was part of the fun of doing things like this.
He stood up straight, heaving, “Oh, woah, ohhhh,” and when he caught his breath he went, “Man, you don’t know how much I missed hearing you say messed up shit like that.”
Missed me? You know who I miss? My best fucking friend! But you turned him against me on the night of the duct tape.
“How do you come up with shit like that?” Skutch asked, still climbing out of his barrel of laughs.
I shrugged that I wouldn’t reveal my secret. Broadly funny guys like Skutch always think that cynically funny guys like me get our jokes from some private source that we hoard away from them. The truth is it comes from years of hating ourselves for not being like normal boys, laying in the dark of our bedrooms, listening to sad and angry music, and learning to metabolize our feelings into twisted phrases that convey the dysfunctions in the world that we fixate on. But you just didn’t share things like that with your fourth-best friend.
“Shit!” I said with urgency, “The manager just looked right at us!”
“Yo, dude, let’s just sit for a minute. That manager will get busy again and quit looking at us in no time.”
I darted over to the last booth before the jukebox and took a seat. Happy Joe’s was a counter service style restaurant. They didn’t have waiters, only food-runners. This was why the night before, T.J., Skutch, and I picked it as the perfect place to hit. Hypothetically, Skutch and I could sit at the booth as long as we wanted. Which meant that, also, this was a good time to talk. Moisture was already accumulating under my arms.
Wiping the water from his eyes, Skutch took the seat across from me. He gave me an honest look like I had rarely seen him use before, like that comment about missing me was something he planned on addressing that afternoon. “So, T.J. said that besides getting ashtrays there was something you wanted to talk to me about?” I mentally cursed T.J. for setting me up like that. He never stuck his neck out for anything. He couldn’t fathom coming out to anyone, let alone what a struggle it was going to be for me to come out to Skutch. I was getting so annoyed with growing up and having to deal with shit that I didn’t want to.
But T.J. and the antidepressant kept urging me that I had to.
“Listen brother, I know it’s been a while since we’ve really hung out and you probably don’t want to get all serious with me right off the bat. Now that I’m coming up on two weeks of being in a committed relationship, I can honestly say that hearing a woman’s perspective has really opened my eyes to things. What I’m saying is I’m a changed man, brother.”
I looked around for something to distract me. Ashtray #8 was set in front of the napkin dispenser. I slid it in front of me, looked around—Allen had gone back to work and nobody in the restaurant was paying attention to us.
You know how at the end of The Crow he puts his hands on the villain’s head and gives him the 30 hours of pain his wife suffered as she died in trauma surgery? I wished I could do that with Skutch. Just flick Ashtray #8 at him, then reach across the table and clench onto his scalp. First, I’d send him to my kitchen, my mother addressing me without looking up from the newspaper: I haven’t seen much of Judd lately. Then just like me, he would have to make up different answers on the spot, over and over again, when put in this exact same scenario with my mother for several months, to not be able to say the real reason: Judd and Skutch quit hanging out with me because they think I’m gay, Mom. For every bullshit answer I gave her, I received that look of disappointment, her assumption that I must have done something stupid to push my friends away. I would like Skutch to see that, because of him, I receded from my parents, receded from everything, and then had the most awkward talk with my father of my whole life: Son, do you think you would like to . . . talk to someone . . . a professional?
I had both hands on Ashtray #8 now, gripping it like I wanted to grip Skutch’s head and send him more memories. My parents were just the tip of the iceberg. Next, I would send him to that night at Judd’s house, when it all went down. How it felt to hear my own friends accusing me of despicable things, with all their stupid jokes about strapping on duct tape to protect themselves from me. I wanted him to cry out in agony as I showed him how it felt to lay there all night, paralyzed with confusion and fear while the two closest friends I ever had cackled at my expense. It wasn’t even funny, but they laughed like it was the funniest shit ever, which made it sting even worse.
The antidepressant was supposed to help me not dwell on all of this anymore.
Okay, just one more memory I’d like Skutch to see: The weekend after the night of the duct tape. Judd and I in his basement standing on either side of his pool table, where we always went to talk about things we didn’t want his parents to hear. Me, spinning a ball in place on the pool table, not able to look up at him.
Can’t we just leave this alone?
Come on, Kyle. Something’s going on. Just tell me.
Nothing’s ‘going on,’ Judd. I like girls! Okay?
. . . Okay.
He quit calling me.
I quit calling him.
Five years of best friendship over, just like that.
All because of Skutch’s bad joke about duct tape.
I wanted to get him back.
So bad.
But T.J. and the antidepressant were in my ear telling me otherwise, that coming out could be the key to bringing all of us back together again.
“You think you got enough ashtrays, man? The closer we get to the back the more we’re risking that manager catching onto us. We could call the mission a success, get out of here and maybe drive around for a while listening to more of that badass Nine Inch Nails remix CD you got. Or we could go someplace quiet and talk . . .”
I put my fingers to my temples.
Yep, my hair was getting sweaty.
Damn antidepressant.
I slid Ashtray #8 off the table and into the right pocket of my leather jacket, making sure that it locked in place with the other three in there. I got up so abruptly Skutch’s eyes bulged. This was the stupidest idea ever. I was going to ream T.J. as soon as it was over.
“Thanks for the offer, but we’re not leaving til we get all of the ashtrays that aren’t currently in use in this place. You ready to finish this, man?”
“When in Rome!”
I was getting seriously sick of him saying that.
∞
We got moving again. There were five more to get, not including the one the two elderly women were flicking their long-stemmed cigarettes into. Five more. No big deal. Then make it out the door without Allen detecting us and we were home free. For now I was done thinking about coming out, quitting wrestling, and my parents.
Skutch leaned over the first booth past the jukebox to grab the ashtray all the way against the wall while I idled at the salad bar—of course this looked ridiculously suspicious. Just as it was within his grasp, I saw him snap his hand back and look up with Uh oh! on his face. A squelching sound quaked across the restaurant. The jukebox stopped playing and the whole place became aware of it. The horde of children and their parents on the smoke-free side of the restaurant froze in place. Skutch took a wide step to join me back at the salad bar.
Everyone in the pizza parlor was just now noticing us.
Two teens not accompanied by adults.
In this moment with the entire restaurant directing their confusion at us, Skutch looked down at me. I looked up at him, wondering what he could possibly want to say right then. He leaned down to my ear and under his breath he said: “Annihilate?”
I tried to hold the laughter down but couldn’t. I flashed him a look that meant: You fucking dick! and simultaneously: You deserve a fist in the shoulder right now! but also: Good one. Totally got me back for the body-swap-with-a-miscarriage joke.
I nodded reluctantly, went ahead and said, “Okay, I missed you too, you big fucking Wookiee.”
To which he replied, “When in Rome, brother.”
This didn’t mean I was ready to forgive him.
Right then, bubblegum sirens attached at several points along the ceiling started that fire truck winding-up sound and circling red lights gave off a dizzying visual sensation throughout the dimly-lit dining room. The door to the kitchen swung open and a person in a Dalmatian costume came running out, waving its arms at the children. Next came a young woman dressed in a white-and-black-striped referee polo. She was honking an old-timey circular brass horn that, against the blaring siren, gave off a cacophony of sounds mimicking prehistoric birds of prey that even after eons of evolution still activated our caveman fear response.
The referee girl began yelling, “Ladies and Gentleman, may I have your attention, please?! Today we have a very special birthday!” and so on, as the employee in the furry costume encouraged the kid of honor to stand up on his chair. The referee honked the goose horn some more, then asked that everyone join in song to wish the clearly terrified child a happy birthday.
Creeping away from the salad bar to the booths at the unattended side of the restaurant, Skutch and I muttered the whole song, ending on: “Happy Birthday . . . dear . . . Kev–? . . . er . . . Ry–an!” During the commotion we took advantage and jacked the ashtrays off the booths and tables on the other side of the jukebox. Once the song was over the referee was busy handing out ice cream, and the Dalmatian retired to the back to take his head off and redeem his well-earned smoke break.
Now we were in the quadrant of the restaurant closest to the counter, with just one more ashtray to go, not at a booth, but at a table out in the wide-open, and still not counting the ashtray being used by the two chatting elderly women. This was the most sensitive zone as you could practically see yellow beams coming out of Allen the manager’s eyeballs. Whenever there was a bad guy with scanning eyeballs in video games, I never got it right on the first try. I tried not to think about that, but let’s be serious, my constant failure at those scenarios in nearly every video game I had ever played in my life was all I could think about as I crept toward the table at the smack-dab center of which was that final ashtray.
A light cast down on it from Nicotine Heaven.
Right as I was reaching for that final ashtray, I looked up and met the eyeballs encased under Allen’s Cro-Magnon brow. I reeled my hand back in and nodded at him. He nodded right back at me. Recognizably. I walked in the direction of the counter as he pulled me in with his tractor beam. As I was doing this, I half-turned my head to Skutch to communicate to him to chill out and watch whatever was about to happen.
“Hey, Allen!” I said as I neared the counter. I stopped at a safe distance and became hyper-sensitively aware of the six stolen items inside the pockets of my leather jacket.
“Hey, I know you!” Allen said, stopping what he was doing behind the counter. Cocking his head as if to call up a recollection, he said as a question: “Tyler?” He had for years called me by names that sounded slightly like mine, but I never bothered correcting him because he always looked so impressed with himself for believing he remembered all of my parents’ kids’ names.
Our names all started with K’s. Why would my name be Tyler?
“Yes, Allen,” I started by boasting my solid recall of his own given name, then finished with, “It is I, Tyler Mustain!”
“Your folks on their way?”
“What? Uhhhh . . . ” then his eyes darted behind me, toward Skutch, my accomplice, who I hoped wasn’t in the action of pocketing anything that didn’t belong to him.
Allen the manager had that permanently pissed-off look in his eyes that middle-aged men trapped in restaurant management always seem to have. Clearly a former athlete, he was daunting in his burliness with thick arms and above-average height. The man had kicked untold denizens of delinquents out of his pizza parlor. Men like him have some kind of carnal instinct they aren’t fully aware of; men whose own once-lofty dreams had over the years been slowly smothered with mozzarella. Once they are drowned so deep beneath the marinara and dough, they grow into being dead-set to ruin the dreams of others. That day, before he recognized me, he looked at me with the same suspecting look he gave every nameless teenager who entered his parlor.
Looking me dead in the eye, he said, “Your folks don’t normally start dinner til seven, six-thirty at the earliest. What brings you here this afternoon?”
I blurted out the following words as placeholders while I teetered on what to say next. “You—know—what—I—came—in—here—for—Allen?”
If I lied to Allen and got away with the ashtrays, then in just a few minutes Skutch and I would be back inside Zorro’s Brother. What if Skutch presses me again about what I wanted to talk about?
So, what if I slip? Give myself and Skutch away to Allen?
We’d spend the rest of the evening with our parents and the cops, going over everything that happened here. For the next few months, Skutch and I would be grounded and doing community service. T.J. would get off my case about telling Skutch at least until all of that was over.
This scenario even contained a secret ingredient: Payback.
The time between Allen’s query and my response stretched like a personal size portion of dough over an extra-large pan . . .
∞
Seth McHenry was the first to go.
By junior high he didn’t have any boy friends because no boy wanted to be his friend anymore. No boy wanted to stay the night at his house. No boy wanted to go to his birthday party, either. From then on, he only talked to girls, only sat with girls, only walked the halls with them. His parents started letting him have girls over to stay the night when they realized it wasn’t girls they needed to worry about leaving him alone with.
Jonah Simmons was next.
In seventh grade, Jonah confided to his girlfriend that he found boys attractive in addition to girls. He must have liked her a lot to have shared that with her, which was too bad because she freaked out and told her friends. Then they spread it around school that Jonah was a fag. For the rest of our school days, Jonah walked to classes alone, sat at lunch alone. The school smartasses coined him a nickname which you could hear whenever he walked by.
Ross McIntyre was never included from the beginning.
Ross was the rare breed who never even tried to cover up. He let his flame burn bright, as they say. Most high school students are excited at the end of the school day, but Ross dreaded it. Whenever I went out to the parking lot, I hopped right into Zorro’s Brother and started it up without it ever occurring to me that someone could have fucked with it. Ross, on the other hand, had to walk around his car to make sure nobody slashed his tires, tossed their garbage onto his hood, stuffed a sock in his tailpipe.
There was no such thing as a gay, bisexual, or even questioning male either coming out or being found out and his group of straight male friends keeping him around. If it’s one thing I wished my straight friends could have known back then, it was that despite their casual jokes about gay men’s insatiable desire to rape straight men and that the only sport I ever excelled at was a smokescreen for gay sex, the reality was that I had more to fear from them than they had to fear from me.
Exponentially more.
All of the other queer boys could tell that I was like them. All guys who are like us look at each other a certain way. When you see it, you run through the gamut of feelings: At first it is mystifying (How can he tell?), then it’s titillating (Does he like me?), but ultimately you fall into a state of paranoia (Is he going to out me?). When you can tell they clocked you, you get the fear that because they were outed, they want justice by outing the boys they can tell are hiding in the closet. When you are in the closet there is nothing more terrifying than an openly queer person.
I didn’t know until much later what the looks I got from the likes of Seth, Jonah, and Ross really meant: They were mournful. They wanted to know what made me so special that my friends kept me around when theirs threw them out. They wished they still had what I had, which was a normal boy’s life of being included in boy things with my boy friends. In the long run, it turned out that I was just better at covering up than they were.
Do I get a prize? No?
How about all the things I lost because of it? My identity, for starters.
Early photos and videos of me portray a child who was not masculine by any measure. Nor could I be described as feminine, either. In one photo I’ll be wearing a clip-on tie and suspenders, in another I’m posing in my grandmother’s jewelry and nail polish. I was my own entity back then, not yet tethered to any gender, and one hell of a happy kid. It wasn’t until adolescence that I learned to cover up my natural way of being with more masculine traits that I picked up from older boys and men and television and movies. By the time I was in high school I had perfected this public image of myself: Captain of the wrestling team, a sweet-ass conversion van with a prominently-displayed NIИ sticker on it.
I snuck out.
I raised hell.
I got bruises.
I got black eyes.
I proved myself.
I learned that I loved being a boy;
The brotherhood of my group of friends.
How much of it was covering up and how much was blending in?
Was there a way to combine these two spirits within myself?
∞
Kyle Mustain’s time came freshman year.
I made the mistake of describing one of our male classmates as “cute.” That was it. All the wallpaper tumbled down in that instant. To Skutch, I may as well have just confessed to murder. He called up several years of mounting evidence before Judd, my best friend. They talked like I wasn’t even in the room. I got the strong feeling this was not the first discussion they’d had on the subject.
I seemed like a guy, but some things about me sure weren’t. For instance, I didn’t like watching pro sports on TV, but I wrestled, which was highly suspect. Most of the jokes I told and retold over the years were about gay sex. By the age of 14, it got to the point that whenever I told yet another gay joke, the guys didn’t laugh anymore, they just looked at me funny. I lost interest in looking at Playboy magazines years before, which I thought I argued pretty convincingly was because I had developed a taste for more hardcore stuff. Skutch countered that the real reason was because I wanted to see dick.
Finally: Don’t you see how he cowers when we talk about catalytic converters?!!!
For Skutch this all translated not just to me being gay, but a gay man who infiltrated the group in order to violate them, one overnight at a time. As if this was something I could have plotted. In Skutch’s mind, all the way back at the age of eight I was rubbing my palms together, going: Just wait until we have all entered this period known as “puberty”—That is when I will strike!
After the night of the duct tape I got used to my phone not ringing anymore. Reclusivity suited me pretty well, actually. I found ways to pass the time. I tried playing video games but they weren’t as fun without my friends. Want to know what I did? I went to the library. I checked out nonfiction books on topics I wanted to know more about.
Then one night my dad came into my room and asked me if I wanted to see a psychologist. I couldn’t fault my parents for that. They were used to me traveling in a pack of boys all the time, then without explanation I was all alone on nights and weekends. Granted, my father found me on the floor with a deck of cards playing an archaic form of solitaire while listening to a recording of my own voice attempting self-hypnosis.[1]
It did look like I was turning into a weirdo.
Sophomore year, T.J. Timmerman and I had English class together and we partnered up on some projects. Naturally, we talked about old times and I asked him what Judd and Skutch were up to those days. T.J., being so close with Skutch, had a lot to get off his chest about him. I became his confidante, the person he could go to to bitch about his best friend. That’s how I became his other best friend.
At the end of sophomore year I took an after-school class to become a lifeguard, got hired by the city, and became friends with the kids who worked there. The summer between sophomore and junior year I started throwing parties at the old family farmhouse.
The parties were how I came back.
The goal was: Host awesome parties, and once I was popular, nobody would question if I was straight anymore. Only that didn’t really pan out. When I got drunk I slipped again. Way worse than calling a boy cute, when I didn’t have the inhibitions of sobriety safeguarding me, everyone saw that happy little kid from my home movies: gesturing wildly, giving sass, twirling, flirting. Eight years of bottled up flamboyance and lust came out to play. I loved being a boy but those first experiences with alcohol revealed that letting that other side of me out was, well, intoxicating.
I didn’t really know if those other queer boys were sadder than me.
I hadn’t been winning at all. I had been lying.
People were talking. The wallpaper was peeling down all around me. The duct tape would not hold. T.J. said it was time to rip the duct tape. So I declared that I would start making changes to try and live out this new way of life. The first step was quitting wrestling, where I knew I was not going to be welcome anymore. T.J. prodded me: What if coming clean to Skutch would set things right?
But I still really wanted revenge.
Wasn’t that the man thing to do?
∞
Allen had his hands on the opposite side of the red counter. It was the kind with the hinged trapdoor so he could rush out of the kitchen to tackle teenagers. Beads of antidepressant-sweat were coming down from places where sweat normally didn’t come out of that were really freaking me out. As we stared each other down, perhaps the longest we had ever maintained eye contact, not just with each other, but with anyone, I had to make my impossible choice.
Some birthday kids ran past. We all had birthday parties there when we were kids, ran around with tokens for games and tickets for prizes. Happy Joe’s used to be my favorite place and yet I hadn’t felt welcome there in years. Funny how its business thrived on children’s birthday parties, then was so hostile towards those same children once we outgrew its fun and games and had to come up with our own.
Man, adults sure are fucked up.
We teens really needed to stick together.
Wait a minute!
My friends weren’t the ones vandalizing Ross McIntyre’s car! I would have known about it. As for Seth McHenry, were we all supposed to pretend we liked listening to girly music just to be nice to him? And I’m sorry, but regardless of Jonah Simmons’s sexual orientation, he was just plain fucking weird.
I finally figured out what the night of the duct tape was really about!
I was such a fool.
In the nick of time, I shouted at Allen’s face, “I would like a job application!”
Don’t ever count me out.
Remember, my whole life up to this point was a lie—and I was damn good at it.
Allen’s expression went from glowering, protectful proprietor and rose up to smiling, prospective employer. He beamed, “Why, sure! Of course, Tyler!” I could see the possible future forming on the bald spot of his head: He and me in the back of the house after the dinner rush, blowing off some steam by having pepperoni and sausage fights; the day I earn the privilege of donning the Dalmatian costume; me gladly accepting it, and then for the rest of this daydream sequence: me in the Dalmatian costume doing an epic breakdance routine against a blue screen projection of pizza-themed graphics.
Teenagers could be okay, as long as we were kept in line.
Allen crouched under the counter. I took the brief opportunity to check that the ashtrays in my pockets were not sticking out. Surely back at the table Skutch was smooth enough to snag the last one, although it sucked that I didn’t get it. Allen came back up with a pad of red-and-white job applications, ripped one off, and handed it to me. “You need a pen? You can fill that out here.”
“What? Oh no, I’ll fill this out at home. I just wanted to pick one up,” then feeling so impressed with myself, I added, “My mom would just love it if I worked here. She thinks you are so cool!”
“Oh, she does? Well, tell her I think she and your dad are pretty cool, too. Go ahead and drop that off whenever you want, Tyler.” He said it with such glee it was hard not to feel sorry for robbing him.
Then I shrugged it cuz I needed those ashtrays more than he did.
I turned fast. Skutch looked flabbergasted at whatever happened that he couldn’t hear over the noise of the birthday party. I shot him a look that said we were safe for now, but to get moving. Then from behind we heard, “Hold on a minute!” and even though it came from seven feet behind me, Allen’s exclamation point was stabbing right into the back of my neck.
Sweat glands opened up into waterfalls all over my body. I turned back around. Allen looked at me sternly. I thought maybe he was searching for signs that I could have been on some kind of drug. I actually was on some kind of drug. Through something like a sound-tunnel I could just barely make out: “Does your friend need one too?”
My own voice was trembling: “W-w-what d-d-did you s-s-say, Allen?”
“You heard me,” he said. His look was mean. I started to cower. Here comes the part where he drowns my dreams in mozzarella. Allen repeated what he had originally said, “Does your friend need an ashtray?”
The jukebox kicked back on. It was playing a song from an animated film. Shit like that was on heavy-rotation at Happy Joe’s because it was a family joint. Another epiphany struck me: I could suck a thousand dicks and take just as many in the ass and I would never like this neutered Disney Channel shit. That made me feel infinitely better about myself.
I digress.
Allen was looking at me like I must be stupid or something. He repeated himself once more, “I said: Does your friend want an application, too?”
“Ohhh! Nooo! H-h-he’s just along for the ride. Y-y-you’ll be hearing from me, Allen!”
Allen shrugged and went back to work.
The job application was now ruined with palm sweat. It flapped against my leg as I walked toward Skutch. He had his hands at the sides of his legs to obscure all the items he’d stuffed down his deep Jnco pockets. Keeping my hand in front of me so Allen couldn’t see it, I waved for Skutch to start moving toward the door.
Now at our mission’s end, I knew just the thing to say to him: “Yippee kay-yay, <Mister Fowlicker!>”
Skutch’s eyes shot wide. “You remember?” he said.
“Of course I do.”
“Well then, the only proper response to that is: Smile, you son of a <shark!>”
It’s an inside joke we’ve had since fifth grade.[2] He came up with the first part, I came up with the second. I always thought mine was funnier, but they work better together than they do apart. I see that now.
“Annihilate, good buddy.”
“Annihilate, brother.”
The birthday party kids were now at the front of the restaurant, blocking the exit. With suckers sticking out of their mouths, they were crowded around the turn-of-the-century love testing machine and the booth that showed shitty Hanna-Barbera cartoons for a quarter. One, then the rest, tilted their heads up and took in the sight of the two of us: One, a gangly giant with shaggy hair, wearing a snowboarding jacket and jeans both two sizes too big for him; The other with colorless, prickly facial hair perforating out of the sides of his face, unnatural hair color that looked more orange than platinum because it came out of a home dye kit. The kids registered our personal attempts to appear as our own interpretations of “cool,” which had only resulted in the tragedy of appearing strained and obvious. They zoomed in to see the red and white, painful-looking little mounds that covered both of our faces. What little skin of ours was unblemished was covered in a layer of glaze that looked like the grease from the paper they wrap around fast food burgers. In their eyes was the shock of realization that the freakish figures standing above them were what they were hurtling toward on this runaway train they hadn’t bought tickets for. It’s how Gregor Samsa must have gotten a little prickle in the back of his neck every time he encountered a dung beetle.
I started to exit through the plate glass door, but before I was out I noticed Skutch, towering colossus that he is, still standing in front of the children. Slowly he leaned over them, allowing their stares to come into focus. He sprawled open his double-jointed fingers, which look more arthropodal than human when spread out. Posturing himself like one of those pro-wrestlers he so admired, he roared the word of the day: “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!” and the children went scurrying in every direction across the restaurant. Straightening up, he turned to me, motioned at the exit, and added, “When in Rome, brother.” Now I caught on that the idiom not fitting the situation was intentional. That’s what made it funny.
We had just made off with every single ashtray that had been sitting on a table that afternoon—save for one. As we were about to exit, I stopped, looked all the way back to the women up at the table nearest the counter. “You know? Only one of them is smoking right now . . . and they’re old. When she picks up her cigarette again, I could swoop in and lift the ashtray.”
“That would be killer, but we’re almost out the door, man. Besides, you already had a close call with the manager back there. Best to err on the side of caution, brother.”
“I know, but Skutch, just picture it: When we’re telling this story to all of our friends at the next party, or someday when we’re sitting by a roasting fire, telling our fucking grandchildren about this day, do we want to say we got all but one, or that we went the distance and got every single ashtray, including one that was being used at the time?”
We had arrived at that free-falling sensation between one friend proposing the improbable, and the other looking him in the eye with the corner of his mouth sprung into anticipatory grin, anxious to see if he’s actually going to go for it. We had been in this situation so many times, at the threshold of an idea we both knew was crazy, but also totally fucking awesome, then waiting to see which of us was going to take the plunge and show the other that it, and practically anything we set our minds to, can be done.
BIO
Essays by Kyle Mustain have appeared at Slate, The Writing Disorder, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and his parents’ refrigerator. This piece is a chapter in the forthcoming memoir, You’re Supposed to Be Somebody: Biting Beer Cans, Banging Soda Bottles, and Smashing Funyuns in the Rural Midwest. He works as a substitute teacher and a waiter in Central Illinois.
[1] To try to make myself not be gay anymore. Okay, and to try to unlock any dormant superpowers I may have had.
[2] To do this joke, when you say the words in brackets you want to make your voice sound like it’s a completely different voice than the one that said all of the words that came before it, just like how some TV stations opt to dub different words over cuss words instead of bleeping them out.
