Because all the time I was lying I still felt that fifty-cent-side kid inside me. So it wasn’t long before I started getting pretty nervous, talking faster and faster, and telling them how I had to leave to get the car that was going to take me to the yacht so I could go watch the nationals, and they asked me which nationals—always calling me “young man,” which I don’t think anybody had ever called me—and that confused the hell out of me, because to tell the truth, I don’t follow any sport too well. So I wound up saying the chess nationals, and told them I was a top-ranked national chess player, and could play blind chess and speed chess and multiples, and I tell you they just ate it up, and the waiter, too, though he looked at me funny sometimes, with a funny smile—a very dignified but sort of funny smile—and he poured those old guys so many drinks, you’d think they’d all have died on the spot.
Then I left and went back outside, and there was no car and no yacht and no nationals.
I hung around in alleys awhile longer.
But I got kind of bored.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do that day. So after about fifteen minutes I went back up to Roland Avenue and caught a bus back to school.
I sat on the bus looking out the window, watching the houses pass by.
I thought what I’d done was crazy, except that it was a lot like hiding.
I mean, at the time it felt like the best hiding I’d ever done.
What made it different, of course, was that I’d actually shown a lot.
It just wasn’t me I was showing.
I guess I felt pretty bad, because unlike Carol I couldn’t just see it as a joke.
I mean, I really felt like nothing.
I’d made myself feel like nothing by not being me.
This was the one time I truly did feel life was horrible and meaningless, because I’d made it that way by just throwing away who I really was, like I was nothing.
Now, I’ve told you all this just like I told Laura. And we were still just walking over the busted sidewalk, but I think we were near my old elementary school by this time. And while I’d told her, I’d sort of gotten excited trying to fit all the details, you know, into what I said, but now I looked at her, and she seemed sort of upset.
“Is that what you are? A kid from the fifty-cent side?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What else?”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No,” I said.
But I thought about that for a while.
I mean, yes, it had bothered me while I was talking to the old men, but on the bus back to school I got used to it.
So I told her that.
“I don’t mean I was happy with it. But I got used to it,” I said. “After a while it didn’t bother me anymore. I guess I got over it. I always have.”
She still had that look in her eyes. I swear to god she nearly had tears in her eyes. Not tears, but almost. “Doesn’t it scare you?”
I sort of laughed. “No,” I said. “I can live with it. Anyways, I’d rather be me than a bunch of lies.”
I looked at her face, tilted downward as we walked, flushed and strained. I don’t know what it was, but she seemed in pain. I hadn’t meant to hurt her with what I’d said, but I thought maybe I had. Maybe she thought it was just too sad for me to think about myself that way, accept myself that way. I didn’t know. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t really so big a problem for me. I mean, I didn’t think I’d just be a fifty-cent-side kid forever. I had hope, and I wanted to tell her that she should have it too, because from what she’d said about the book, I doubted she did, even though I couldn’t yet understand why. I wanted to tell her that I felt I could change my life, and that even if I thought it sucked now, I knew that one day, maybe when I was twenty-five—or maybe even sooner—I would take more control of my life, get the apartment I wanted, downtown in some old hotel, and be what I wanted to be, once I figured it all out.
Get my life together the way I wanted it.
Maybe even with her, if I was lucky enough.
But I couldn’t admit I wanted her that much. I guess I was afraid. So I didn’t say a thing.
We walked a bit in silence. Weirdly enough, she took my hand.
Suddenly, everything felt a bit lighter.
We talked some more.
About other stuff.
Meaningless stuff.
She had this idea about me getting golf lessons, and I’d never even played golf, so she said she’d give me lessons.
Believe it or not we talked a lot, and she held my hand the whole time.
For one of the first times she seemed sort of happy with me. And it was weird, because I’d really kind of argued with her—I mean at least when the subject was the book—and not because I’d wanted to or even meant to, but because I was just so exasperated having to hear about that book again that I just had to say what I really felt.
I mean, instead of my usual thing of making her go numb telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, I’d sort of reacted to her—to what she said about the damn book—and even though she didn’t agree with me, she liked it.
I couldn’t believe it.
I mean, I’d almost been sort of mad with her, almost even yelled, because just talking about that book, which I can’t frickin’ stand, made me feel so damned emotional, because I really can’t just accept anybody telling me life
