Why Aren't You Smiling? Read online

  “Oh.” I set the book down on the chair.

  “Of course, when I was your age, I was quite devout,” she added softly.

  “What?” I’d never considered that my parents hadn’t always been skeptics. “You believed in God?”

  “Not just God,” my mom smiled, “Jeeeeesus!” She held her hands aloft and wiggled her fingers, her eyes twinkling with humor. “I grew up in Tennessee, remember. I didn’t even know what atheism was till I moved to California. But as soon as I heard there were people who didn’t believe, I knew I was one of them.”

  “But before that, did you pray?”

  “Sure. I was even saved. One Sunday I got up there in church with all the miserable sinners and threw myself on the mercy of the Lord. That would have been when I was about twelve. By the time I was your age, I was already starting to get a little sick of it. I may be flattering myself, but I think I had an instinctive revulsion to the charlatanism.”

  “But what did you think of Christ’s message? Did you believe in Love?”

  “The sort of Christians I grew up around were more into fire and brimstone than Love.”

  “But you must have heard Jesus’s teachings,” I protested. “You must have heard about Love.”

  She sighed. “I suppose I did. But it didn’t leave an impression. Love’s all fine and dandy, but…” She put on a concentrated face, choosing just the right words. “Love is just one of a whole range of emotions the human animal is capable of. It’s a response to certain stimuli in the environment, just like fear or happiness. I very much doubt you can just arbitrarily decide to feel more of one emotion than another.”

  “But Love isn’t just, like, you know, another emotion,” I sputtered. “It’s what brings people together and… and…” I had no idea what I meant.

  “I’m not saying Love isn’t more pleasant to experience than other emotions, or that it isn’t better for society. I just think human nature is set a certain way and there’s not all that much we can do about it.”

  “Oh.” This wasn’t anything I wanted to hear.

  “What are you doing looking at the Bible anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  My mother looked at me with her x-ray vision. “You’re getting curious about religion, aren’t you?”

  “A little.”

  She pursed her lips as if steeling herself. “Just so long as you know you don’t have to believe everything you read.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mom.”

  She emitted one of her worried sighs. “And for heaven’s sake, be careful.”

  My father walked into the living room where I lay on the sofa enraptured by Mary Tyler Moore. “Telephone.”

  “Me?” Nobody ever called me.

  “Didn’t catch his name, but it sounded like someone your age.” My father wore a hint of a smile I interpreted to mean Thank goodness Leonard finally has a friend. I was starting to think he was a creepy psycho loner.

  I scrambled into the hallway and picked up the receiver of our olive green push-button phone. I tried to make my voice sound casual. “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me, Mordecai.”

  “Hey,” I said, then froze. It’d been so long since someone my age phoned me I’d forgotten the routine.

  Fortunately, Mordecai jumped right in. “I’m changing my name.”

  Total confusion. “Really? How come?”

  “The other day, this guy called me Morty.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  The conversation was going so well I dared venture a joke. “Morty sounds like some old guy who owes you forty bucks.”

  “Mordecai ain’t much better. It’s kind of weird.”

  “It’s not so weird,” I lied.

  “Thought I’d shorten it to Kai, with a K.”

  I rolled it around in my head. Kai. Kai. The name fit him perfectly, its hardness echoing his hard-bodied physique, its brevity his short stature. The name somehow radiated youth, exoticism, and modernity. It was hipper than hip. A Kai would never get picked last for teams or get his head shoved in the toilet, he’d kiss girls and go windsurfing. “That’s a totally cool name,” I said, a little sad only because now that it was taken, I couldn’t change my own name to Kai.

  “So, you know, I just thought I’d better call you up to let you know when you see me at school you should call me that.”

  “OK.” I hadn’t given him my phone number and realized he must be leafing through the phone book calling everyone he knew to announce his decision. Only Kai’s total lack of self-consciousness kept this part of the name change from seeming dorky.

  “So, what’re you up to?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I lied, deeply ashamed of my TV addiction. “You?”

  “Just, you know, changing my name. Not really changing, shortening.” He seemed adamant about the distinction.

  “Right. You gonna make your mom and dad call you Kai?”

  “My mom’s dead. Dad thinks it’s a good idea. Mordecai was Mom’s idea. He never liked it.”

  I froze. Would it be proper to say sorry about his mom, or would mentioning his loss just add to the pain? I took the chance. “That sucks about your mom.”

  “Yeah, well, you know.” He was taking it like a man. “Anyway, so I’ll see you around at school.” He sounded ready to ring off.

  “Sure. See you later, Kai.” Saying his name made my scalp tingle.

  “Later, man.” The line went dead.

  I wandered back to the sofa, no longer quite so desperate to slip into a TV daze. As I watched the screen ghostly half-thoughts whirled around in my head. Kai’s lack of a mother lent him an air of After School Special tragedy that explained his independence and toughness. I imagined him at home with his father, living rough, like a couple of bachelors. There’d be none of that motherly nagging about safety, nutrition, or hygiene that made me feel like a coddled child. Kai and his dad probably put their feet up on the coffee table, drank soda (maybe even beer) right out of the can, or might even walk around the house in their underpants. Though I didn’t dare envision it, the thought gave me shivers. If only I could be Kai’s brother.

  While vacuuming the living room, I keenly felt the unfairness of being expected to clean house before company. After all, it was my parents’ guests who were coming over, why couldn’t they clean? Still, I couldn’t get too worked up because, though I didn’t like to admit it, I found their friends entertaining. Drawn from what passed for the local intelligentsia, they were a jovial crowd, full of wry jokes, polished anecdotes, and amusingly arch opinions. That evening we were hosting the Knudsens and the Eltzbachers, two of my favorites.

  Gareth Knudsen was an English professor, as well as an Englishman, in his late fifties who turned his own vaguely aristocratic drunken dishevelment into an amusing parody of itself. His snowy hair invariably stuck out at odd angles and he was forever wielding a pipe like a pointer while making cynical remarks. His wife, Marie, was French and a Marxist, which struck me as thrillingly exotic. Jeff and Leona Eltzbacher, a handsome couple in their late thirties, ran a store specializing in Peruvian handicrafts down the street from my mother’s culinary shop. Their energetic blond optimism could have been square, except for their habit of belittling the modern American way of life as less humane and authentic than traditional Latin American culture.

  Cleaning the living and dining rooms took forever, and I finished only seconds before the front doorbell rang. My mother, wearing most of her Interesting Jewelry, opened the door and the Knudsens shambled into our hall. My father, tidied up from his usual weekend slob clothes into a dress shirt and knit tie, came in to shake hands. Gareth reached into a brown paper bag and withdrew not one but two bottles of wine. “We didn’t know what you were making so we brought red and white.” His English accent somehow made this sound like a great joke and everyone laughed.

  Once the guests were comfortably seated in our Danish modern chairs, my mother passed around platters of vegetables
and blue cheese dip while my father opened the wine and poured glasses for everyone (except me). Carol Knudsen had a joke about Nixon’s gravestone epitaph, which would read, “Here lies Richard Nixon… so what else is new?” This prompted my father to repeat his Rockefeller joke from the other night. Then everyone chatted about current affairs with good-humored disgust until Jeff and Leona arrived, bearing more wine. The two couples were introduced, and of course the new bottle of Chablis had to be sampled. I was happy to see that everyone was hell-bent on getting smashed, which made it far more likely the conversation would stray into Adult Territory.

  Several glasses of wine later, my mother herded us all into the dining room where she served the meal to the appropriate oohing and aahing. The food inspired a long discussion about the differences between various national cuisines that bored me stiff until Gareth began a tongue-in-cheek defense of English cookery, which he insisted was the best in the world by virtue of being so inedible it kept his countrymen slender. He went on to describe with great affection the hilariously horrific dishes served by his “mum” such as figgy dowdy, black pudding, and toad-in-the-hole. As he spoke I couldn’t help but marvel at his poor posture and the way his jerky movements made it seem like his bones were jointed together sideways. At the end of his story, everyone had a good laugh, and Gareth, eager for more material, turned to me and asked, “So, Leonard, what are the Young People reading these days?”

  I was delighted to act as a spokesman for the Young People, as pretending to be part of a homogenous generational mass made me feel less unpopular. We young people, I happily informed him, were at that moment very fond of Kurt Vonnegut.

  “Well,” said Gareth in his dry drawl, “I suppose that’s one step up from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, though not a big step.” As Gareth proceeded to lay into Vonnegut, my heart sank and my throat constricted. I adored Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The books was a thin, metaphorical, metaphysical story – with lots of grainy black and white photo illustrations – about a seagull who eschews the mundane search for food in favor of flight experimentation. His flock, appalled by this nonconformity and flouting of tradition, expels him. After some time on his own, Jonathan is discovered and adopted by a secret brotherhood of seagulls who live to fly. Amongst them, he encounters Chiang, a wise old seagull who teaches him the secret of instantaneous teleportation: “Know that you have already arrived.” Jonathan then becomes a teacher and leads other seagulls down the path to Wisdom.

  On discovering the book at the library, I’d been so amazed at its cosmic significance that I’d immediately run out and bought my own hardcover copy, which I reread every few weeks. It was the first book to (as I thought of it) open my eyes to the Larger Truth behind the façade of physical reality. And though my experiments with instantaneous teleportation had come to naught, I still cherished it as a sacred and holy text. To hear the book put down so snidely made me furious. As soon as Gareth paused in his evisceration of Cat’s Cradle to sip his wine, I blurted out, “Don’t you think Jonathan Livingston Seagull examines some, like, really interesting theological questions?” I was secretly proud of myself for so deftly wielding the word “theological.”

  Gareth put down his wine in a manner that telegraphed his extreme exasperation. “It’s a one-dimensional parable in which talking seagulls spout platitudinous clichés.”

  I hated sounding stupid, but had to ask, “Does ‘platitudinous’ mean like a platypus?”

  Everyone erupted into laughter. I felt my face flush with total embarrassment and my throat closed so tightly I suspected I would never speak again. My mother thoughtfully suppressed her mirthful sniggering to explain, “A platitude is like a dull clichéd remark that’s supposed to be deep, like telling someone who’s just lost their job, ‘Life has its ups and downs.’ ”

  The laughter tapered off, but my humiliation left me frozen. Leona was the first to speak. “I do think Americans could benefit from a little more philosophical introspection. We’ve become so busy proving how smart and powerful and rich we are that we’ve lost the ability to connect with life on a more spiritual level. When Jeff and I were in Peru ,we once saw a peasant stop work and just sit, staring off into the distance.”

  Jeff took over the anecdote. “I asked him what was wrong, because being an American I naturally assumed something had to be wrong for him to stop working. He turned to me with a smile and gestured toward the sky and said, ‘What a beautiful sunset!’ And you know, it was an incredible sunset. I hadn’t noticed because I was busy rushing back to the shuttle bus.”

  Leona picked up the thread. “We spend our whole lives grubbing for money and forget about life’s intangibles.”

  Jeff: “Our Anglo-Saxon Puritanism has cut us off from not just Mother Nature, but our own human nature.”

  Leona: “If it takes talking seagulls to get us to slow down and take a look at ourselves, so be it.”

  Gareth drained his wine glass and addressed the table. “I’m not arguing that we should experience life on a purely material level, I just think that this Seagull book offers simplistic metaphysical …”

  My father interrupted. “But does meaning have to arise from complexity? Can’t the truth be simple?”

  “Right,” said Marie, with a coldly devilish smile and a flip of her bobbed hair. “If Peruvian peasants can find Truth in a sunset while their brutal, neo-Colonialist government traps them in ignorance and poverty, can’t there also be truth in a trite, poorly written, inspirational novel designed to depoliticize youth and distract them from their oppression with metaphysics?”

  Leona frowned. “I think encouraging spirituality is a profoundly political act.”

  Jeff added, “Today’s youth are far more political than we were fifteen years ago, and more interested in metaphysics. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

  My mother took a shot. “A book can certainly raise important questions without being great literature.”

  These comments came right on top of each other and Gareth turned his head with theatrical quickness from one speaker to the next, making a show of being besieged. Finally he held up the palms of his hands, signaling everyone to stop. “Look, simplicity is not the same as being simplistic. Sunsets and seagulls are all very fine in and of themselves, and I’m sure nobody is saying Peru wouldn’t benefit from throwing off the shackles of American imperialism, but I’ve been given to understand this book is nothing more than a cynical remarketing of Kahlil Gibran, without any particular literary or philosophical merit.”

  My mother cocked her head to the side quizzically. “Given to understand?”

  A smile played about Gareth’s lips as he hunched down in his seat, scowling at his tetrazzini. “Well, you know, I haven’t actually read the blasted thing.”

  Everyone erupted into another chorus of wine-drenched laughter that I didn’t really feel like joining.

  Becoming a Burnout came neither naturally, nor easily to me. A certain upright, uptight aspect clung to my persona. My wardrobe, in particular, posed a worry. My dress shirts and corduroy slacks were distinctly un-Burnout. I told my mother I needed some new clothes, and after a twenty-minute historical encapsulation of the trauma suffered by America’s youth during the great depression and World War II (new clothes? don’t make me laugh!), she offered to take me to Sears.

  “But, Mom, they have dorky clothes there,” I whined piteously. “Just give me some money and I’ll go get some stuff down by the university.”

  “What?” She made it sound as if I’d wanted to go to the moon.

  “Yeah,” I said casually, “I’ll just pick up some jeans and tee-shirts.”

  I could almost see the wheels turning in her head. Leonard = Teenager. “Oh, all right, I suppose.”

  My mother’s concept of how much clothing costs was also stuck in the Depression, and I only got enough money for a couple of outfits. I felt tempted to buy something offensive to protest her frugality (a tee-shirt bearing the image of a droopy-eyed caterpilla
r on a mushroom smoking a hookah, say), but sensibly restrained myself. If I came home with inoffensive stuff there was a better chance she’d cough up more cash next time. I finally settled on two pairs of denim bellbottoms and a pair of tee-shirts, one emblazoned with a vaguely tropical floral design, the other with a peace sign. Once clad in these, I discovered what amounted to a new super-power, the ability to walk down the street without getting sneered at by my peers. I immediately boxed up my old wardrobe and put it in the basement, even though this meant my new clothes were often dirty and quickly became ragged from continuous wear. That was OK. Dirty and ragged was kind of a cool look.

  I did long for more clothes, though, as well as more posters, a “Save the Whales” belt buckle I’d seen at a street fair, candles, incense, and of course, records. There was nothing to do but get job. Fortunately, the world can always use another paperboy. It meant rising at the crack of dawn and dealing with a manager who spoke exclusively in sports metaphors (so I never had any idea what he was talking about), but at least I had a regular income. Once I’d acquired a few more cool clothes and my room was reasonably cluttered with head shop junk, I started putting my earnings away in an Escape Fund, the money I’d use to get to Oregon. All my childish fantasies of discovering a lost city of gnomes or inventing a time machine gave way to a single vision of life with Rick.

  But being a Burnout involved more than clutter and clothing, it meant eating lunch at the Benches. Every day was an adventure there. Occasionally I’d share a few innocuous words with Kai or another boy, and sometimes I’d even consent to play handball, but mostly nobody spoke to me and I simply observed the amazing variety of bizarre and anti-social behavior. I saw one kid produce a teacher’s purse he’d lifted from her desk, another sold pot right in front of me, and yet another regaled his friends with a lengthy (and possibly fictional) account of screwing our classmate, Janet Bertinelli, who he referred to as his “old lady.”