TAPE THREE 7/5/85

So, I ask you Wolly, was I so wrong to think that after what had happened Marlene and I might have some future, that there might be some warm feelings there? I sure was! In the weeks that followed I thought about Marlene all the time, but it became impossible to talk to her. She was never at home, or she never answered the door. The phone wasn't in the directory because they'd moved in so recently, but when I called information they told me it was unlisted.
The logical place for two students to meet should be school, but it never happened. If I caught sight of her between classes she quickly disappeared around a corner or into the girls' bathroom. If I were cagey and managed to trap her in the hall, she quickly struck up an intense conversation with anyone, and I looked silly trying to break in. Worse yet, she began to hang out with the tough girls and their leather jacket boyfriends. At lunch she always sat in their crowd. She continued to wear tough clothes, but now it was California tough. Most of the guys she hung with at lunch were not only in the tough crowd, but were twelfth graders.
The frustration was building. What could have happened to make her avoid me so constantly? I may not have been the greatest thing to hit her life, but wasn't like I'd ruined her or treated her so badly. She could at least say a few words to me.
One noon, as I came out of the lunch line, I saw her sitting with one of her new friends. Both had their backs to me. I decided to sit down with them anyway and cause a scene. If she was going to be an asshole, I could be one, too. As I got near the table, the guy, Leo Frank, who had a great reputation for kicking ass, got up and left without noticing me. Before Marlene could do the same, I wheeled in front of her. She looked very startled; something like panic crossed her face for an instant, and then her eyes narrowed, harder to read.
"Look, I know what you want, but I can't see you anymore. Just leave me alone and quit chasing me around school."
"Chasing you around school?"
"Yeah. I see you after class. You're always looking for me, and I just don't have time for it. What happened - I don't regret it, but you're just not my type.'
"Well, that's damn big of you. I see you're really making a classy selection of guys that are 'your type'." I glanced at Leo’s back as he went through the door.
"You little shit. Who told you you could make judgments about my life and my friends? At least he’s honest about who he is and what he wants. He doesn't slip around the neighborhood peeking in windows and looking sad for freebies."
Our voices were low, but the heat of the conversation was beginning to be felt by some others nearby, including a table of guys I knew. Several were looking over to see what I was involved in. Despite the things that Marlene was saying to drive me away, and despite my hurt, I didn't want to get into an argument with her. I wanted to try to straighten things out.
"Look, I don't want to fight with you," I said.
“Good. Then leave me alone."
“How can I do that when I can't stop thinking about you? You know that I tried to get to know you before we did that. You know that's not the only thing on my mind. I honestly like you. I want at least to be friends. I don't see why you gotta put me down like this."
"I told you what I had to say. I don't need a friend. I have friends. I don't like going around with wimps. Not you; not your table full of wimp buddies over there that always say nice things to me when I go by them. Hey, I've gotten paid for doing less than I did with you and by guys with more talent by far. You got away easy. Just let it go at that. I don't want to fight either, and I can't fight if I can't see you, so just take a walk."
During this conversation I'd gone from embarrassment through shame and had ended up in a raging fury. It says something about my development that I didn't hit something or start yelling like I might have a couple of months earlier. Instead, I stood up, my face flushed, my ears so burned they felt like cinders, brought my face close to Marlene's, and said in a dead quiet voice,
“You can say anything you want to. I know it's all bullshit. I know what I felt when we were together and I know you felt it, too. It wasn't sex for money. It didn't even have to be sex. I felt you, and you felt me, and you liked me, and that's all I wanted to talk about."
Her eyes reddened a bit as I talked. She'd started to lower her head but kept her eyes fixed on mine until I stopped. Then she said in a deep hiss,
"I said, get out of here. Just get away from me."
I couldn't see a damn thing in that cafeteria. I don't know how I managed to get out the door. I remember that my friends called to me as I passed them, but I turned my back on them and got outside. The rest of lunch I spent wandering brainlessly around the campus.
Somehow I got through my afternoon classes without causing a scene. I had Latin and world history classes in the afternoon, and I know that if anyone had asked me to do anything more than sit I would have gotten violent. Maybe we had tests, maybe we read; I had no idea.
Sixth period was PE, and that day we had a cross country meet. We dressed out and drove to the park. By this time my rage, instead of dying out had grown. I decided to commit suicide on the cross country course. Nothing violent: I would kill myself running. My heart would blow up and I’d die a hero.
That day, we were competing against St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic high school. Things started off badly. Al's asshole cousin, Billy Finley, was on the team although he couldn't run worth shit. What he could do is get everyone pissed off. That day in a loud voice, which was the only one he used, he was telling a joke about some nuns who are talking about Polish sausages and demonstrating their lengths and thicknesses with their hands when an old deaf nun comes up, watches their gestures and asks, "Father Who?" It was an old joke. Whenever someone was talking about Catholics one of the guys would always say, "Father Who?" in a squeaky old lady's voice. Finley only brought it up now to raise a little dust with the kids on the other team, which he did. A couple of their guys were starting to walk over to our group when the coaches whistled to start the race.
When the race began I blitzed to the front of the pack, far from my usual spot in back center. As we reached the end of the park and made the turn to begin climbing the hill I expected to die right there. I threw up without losing stride and started up the slope. I was holding first, but one of the St. Thomas school guys was right off my heel. Was he crazy enough to think that I was running a serious race? We ran side by side up the paved stretch of the hill and jumped the chain together. As we began the dirt part of the course we entered a very narrow stretch with a sharp dropoff on the left. Somehow our feet tangled up, and he fell off the course into some sage bushes, which are not the softest. I heard him yelling and cussing, but I knew it wasn't intentional on my part. Anyway, he probably wasn't hurt much if he could make so much noise. I couldn't stop. My prime mission was to induce a heart attack and die in glory. This was the best part of the course for that. From here on it shot straight up the hill. I raced on, my lungs screaming, my legs bursting, certain of entering the final agony with each stride. Suddenly I was at the top and still alive. I coasted down the backside of the course and made my way back to the chain. I could feel some runners closing on me, but with my lead and the best competition eliminated, I didn't even have to sprint too hard across the park to claim my first victory.
Now I was really screwed up. Not only didn't I die, I won. This was supposed to be the worst day of my life, and everyone was congratulating me. However, things got put in perspective pretty quick.
The guy who'd fallen off the course came straggling in at the end of the pack. Apparently even his own guys hadn't stopped to pick him up. But he'd been seen in the front, and now all sorts of witnesses appeared to testify that I'd knifed him, axed him, whatever, to get him out of the way. He said something like that was the only way chickenshits could win a race. As usual, my eloquence under pressure was really great, so I just hit him in the face.
Everyone stood back in amazement - amazed that I would win a race in the first place and amazed that old quiet Andy was pounding shit out of some guy, even though he was pretty skinny.
The coach broke it up and put the cap on a great day. First he forfeited my win for poor sportsmanship; then he told me to meet him at his office when we got back to school. There he told me that he almost suspected cheating, seeing a big win like that after my never winning before. That really got to me, but, as usual, I couldn't think of any way to explain my mind, so I kept quiet. Then he got into the part about bigoted jokes - like I was the one who told it - and how the school couldn't tolerate that, and he hoped that was not becoming part of my character. Then he waited, but I still couldn't say anything much; so he gave me some extra workouts as punishment, and I left.
The shit with Soz was really the capper. Of all the teachers I had, he was the one I liked the most. It really hurt to have him think badly of me. All that weekend I thought about ways to explain and vowed to talk to him on Monday.
Actually, I’d been thinking about talking to Soz for a long time. I still don’t know what I would have said. Maybe I could have gotten into it slowly, like just hanging out in the gym office or helping with cleanup or something. Maybe he’d just get used to me being there, like I used to hang out at my father’s shop, and then we could sorta shoot the shit. I guess it was really that I missed my father, missed having some manly influence in my life - someone who could just listen to my shit and give me some clue as to how a man would handle all that - y’know what were the manly ways, the manly virtues.
But, as it turned out, I didn’t talk to Soz that Monday. The reason was the Blue Flamer. The whole thing that happened just shows how stupid it was to think that hanging out with cross country guys would do anything positive for my reputation. To see what I mean, just consider Jack Marshall. He was the kind of kid who would do just about anything on a dare, which provided a lot of guys with entertainment when they couldn't think of something else to do. But it was in the ninth grade that he really settled on what he thought would be his great claim to fame: the Blue Flame.
In case you don't know what that was all about, the name came from a natural gas-powered race car that the local gas company was sponsoring for public relations. It was called the Blue Flame Special, because natural gas was supposed to burn that way.
Somehow Marshall found out that he could blow a fart and light it, and it would also burn blue. No kidding, he could bend over, rip one off, light it with a lit match between his legs, and it would shoot out a blue tongue of flame. The Blue Flamer was born.
Now some guys might try something like that a few times just for the hell of it. They might even show a close friend for a laugh. But Marshall really fell in love with the idea. Somehow it really tied in with his image of himself, like he'd been chosen by God to illuminate the world or something. He worked on his skill day and night until he really had something. He got to the point that, even with his pants on, he could blow a flame almost two feet long, and, as most kids lives are really pretty boring anyway, the other kids loved it. They were always getting Marshall to light off in the gym or out on the field when the coaches weren't looking or even in the school heads. He got so famous that even the girls knew about it -although I don't think he ever did it in front of a girl- and I think that some of the teachers had an idea. Basically, his whole personality finally came down to farting.
Now, like most fanatics, he finally went too far. He got so that he could fart anywhere and everywhere. I don't know if it was pride of farting, if his sphincter was getting a little loose from so much use, or if he was just eating too many beans, but he would rumble them off in the halls, in the locker room, even in class. It was impossible to get into any small enclosed space with him, like a car, for example, or a gymnasium. He would even shoot them off in the shower room, where there was no hope of lighting them, and that was what caused his downfall.
The plot began with some football guys, of course. They’d gone along with blue-flaming as long as it had been popular, but now had grown tired of the whole thing. For their weapon of choice, they used Fleers Double Bubble. At the time when Marshall usually went to the showers, a group of about ten football players gathered there and received two or three pieces of bubble gum each, depending on capacity. When Marshall appeared, one quietly circulated among the others, collecting the soggy wads into one huge flame stopper. Marshall, with the sixth sense of the true artist, suspected foul play and made a break for the door. Too late. In a mass tackle, he was grounded A hell of a fight ensued, because he was pretty big for a runner, but in the end they had him, upside down and spread-eagled and applied the coup de grace right between the legs.
Marshall raged and tried to get a piece of his tormenters, but it was useless. The more he ran around, the more securely the gum was implanted. Finally he was reduced to a sobbing mess in the middle of the locker room floor.
Soz got involved in this because he was supervising the gym that day. I guess he felt that after the stink with the Catholic school he didn't need any more trouble, so he took it on himself to get Marshall cleaned up and keep the thing out of the main office. The problem was that Marshall was really hairy. Coach sent him into the head with some solvent, but every time Marshall tried to pull the gum off the screams could be heard all over the place.
Finally Coach decided that the only way was to cut it off, so he took Marshall to his office, had him bend over his desk and carefully snipped out the mess, as much as he could. I know all this because guys took turns standing on each other's backs to get a look in the transom over the office door until some other coaches came in and drove them off.
At last Marshall left the office, trying to look as cool as he could, but, ironically, the final blow was delivered by Soz himself. One of the kids overheard him saying to another coach that he couldn't take much more of that kind of shit, but he guessed he was lucky that at least Marshall hadn't blown any bubbles. When that got around, the mighty BlueFlamer was instantly reduced to "Bubbles" for the rest of his high school career. It crushed him, and his flame was forever extinguished.
Naturally , I just tried to stay out of Soz's way after all that, and that was too bad. Things might have been different if I'd had someone to talk to. Things never did work out that we could just sit down and talk about things, but I always had the idea that if we could, it would be good, that he'd say things - I don't know what - that might help me through.
To tell the truth, maybe there was another reason I didn't talk to Soz. Maybe I was a little intimidated by what others thought of him. Some of the students - and even some of the coaches - thought he was a little nuts.
He didn't look strange. Sherman Sosky was big, broad shouldered, and heavy muscled. He looked more like a football coach than a track coach. But he was the track coach, and he was good at it.
One reason people thought he was nuts was because of his constant projects to raise money. He had run-a-thons and jog-a-thons and walk-a-thons or anything else-a-thon that might bring in a few coins. There were candy sales and magazine sales and bedpan sales until the principal finally had to tell him to stop.
And then there were the cons he would pull. Take the pep rallies, for example. After about the third pep rally of the fall, when the people who planned those things began to run out of things to do, they would put an extra row of chairs on the gym floor behind where the football players sat, and, after fumigating us carefully, they'd let the cross country team sit there. Then, when everyone was done worshiping the football guys, Soz was allowed to get up and introduce the runners.
He'd been waiting for this and he didn't just run down the list of names and get off. He had something special to say about each guy - three-time letterman, ran last week's race with four impacted toenails, all conference this or that - and then came the scores.
"Next is Mark Buschemi," he'd say, "who is close to tying the league high-point record. Mark has totaled 72 points in our last three meets."
Now this sounds spectacular except that in cross country the low score wins. First place gets one point, last gets fourteen. The crowd would go wild for a turkey who'd come in dead last three times in a row. No one knew shit about cross country, but high points, that's got to be great. So all the duds became kings for a day as Soz continued his number magic. Kids would wonder why everyone on the cross country team was cracking up, but they just marked it up to weirdness.
I was so concerned with being somebody that I couldn't see clearly what Soz was doing, but I can now. I was more concerned with getting a leg up than with helping out the idiots on the team. But Coach knew they were just kids trying to learn something and get by and do what had to be done. They had the same right to a chance as anybody. He knew that all systems have their shit. Whatever you do, it's there. Instead of fighting it and getting all bitter like some teachers, or sucking up to it and being phony like others, he used it to get something for the students
Maybe there was some good reason for pep rallies, but more often than not they were times for the glorification of the same old kids. And they were just the kids who didn't need more glory. So Soz conned everyone. He was just seeing to it that some kids who badly needed some attention got it and got it the right way. I mean, could he really stand up in front of the whole school and say, "This asshole is one of the worst runners in the league?" Maybe that little bit of glory goosed the kid on to something better the next week, and then Coach could stand up there and say something good about him that was true, too.
And what was all the money-raising about? At the end of each sport's season there was always an awards banquet. Soz's were famous. First, they weren't rubber chicken in the school cafeteria. Soz hired the banquet room at the Verdugo Inn, and it was steak all around. And then came the awards.
There were the usual ones like best runner, most improved, most inspirational; but it didn't stop there. There were plaques for the team managers. I mean, cross country manager is usually the nerd-of-all-nerds job and these guys got plaques. And then followed categories no one had ever heard of: Most Consistent (consistently bad), Most Creative (always cut across the course), Most Orderly (fewest roaches in his locker), Best Prepared (got his shoes on the correct feet five days in a row), and if he couldn't get you into one of these there was one for "participant."
Of course, we got ripped up by the kids in other sports, and I heard other coaches groused about "debasing the concept" of awards, but I remember one day years later when one of my kids came across a couple of my trophies in a box in the garage - the only ones I ever got for anything - and we had a long talk about the great old days of high school track, and I could see he saw me in a little different light. #
Soz was a con man, sure, and he shoveled the shit around like the best of them; but he knew where the shit stopped and the real stuff began.With things that counted he didn't mess around, like forfeiting my win for fighting or getting on me for not doing my best to prepare for a meet. He was a good man. When I really think about it, I think one of my mistakes was in not trying to talk to Soz when I could.

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