Why Aren't You Smiling? Read online

  Once Douglas spotted me at the Benches. He was alone, and yet acted with the same supreme confidence he’d previously had with his henchmen to back him up. “Hey, Faggot, suck any good cocks lately?” I was appalled. Hadn’t he gotten the message that I was no longer a Dweeb but a Burnout and that this sort of harassment was thus completely inappropriate? He ought to have been holding his nose and saying, “What stinks?”

  “Leave me alone,” I pleaded, quickly shoving my sandwich into my book bag. Douglas walked over, and with one swift motion, scooped out my sandwich and threw it into the middle of a handball game. Instinctive fear froze my mind and body. Douglas socked me on the upper arm, hard. “That’s for being ugly.” I covered the injury with my hand. He socked me there again, hurting my fingers as well as my arm beneath. “That’s for being fat.” I pulled my hand away and Douglas re-socked the bruise. “That’s for being a fag.” It felt like my flesh had dissolved into mush and his fist was hitting right against bone. I suppressed a whimper as he hit me again. “That’s for being a Dweeb.”

  This focused my fear, pain, and humiliation into fury. “I am not a Dweeb!” I barked. I couldn’t say I was a Burnout because Burnouts were too indifferent to social categories to call themselves that, but I had to let him know. “I always eat lunch at the Benches!”

  He looked at me quizzically. “So?”

  It occurred to me that Douglas wasn’t terribly bright. He was just a sadist who roamed through the world in search of victims, blithely unaware of all social and spatial divisions. Before I could answer his “So?” I beheld a sight too wondrous for words. The handball players had taken offense at Douglas interrupting their game with my sandwich and were now huddled around Douglas’s book bag… peeing! In spite of the pain in my arm (and the vague sense that people who Loved didn’t laugh at the misfortunes of others), I broke into a joyous cackle. Douglas turned to see what I was looking at and let out a holler.

  There was an altercation, of course. Fists and foul language flew. I wanted to join in the fun, but Douglas was already outnumbered, I didn’t know how to fight, and was a devout pacifist anyway. When finally Douglas left the scene holding his bag by two fingers with a disgusted look on his face, I gave the handball players a standing ovation. They smiled and bowed deeply from the waist like concert pianists and returned to their game. I was left alone to berate myself for my unChristian feelings towards Douglas.

  At Christmas vacation, Danny came home from college. I’d been looking forward to letting him see how I’d transformed, imagining the look of wondrous admiration he’d bestow upon me as I told him about my Journey. I was, after all, rather young to be undertaking such a serious spiritual quest. When he walked in the door, however, I nearly recoiled. His hair was now a little shorter than mine, the respectable medium length of young people on TV sit-coms. After greeting my parents, Danny, as usual, shut himself in his room and began blasting his stereo. I waited a decent interval, fifteen minutes, before knocking on his door. This was against precedent. For as long as I could remember, our chats had always been initiated by his knocking on my door, but this time I had something to say.

  Danny’s voice bellowed out, “Hey, Squirt, c’mon in!” I went in and sat in the armchair as Danny turned the volume down on Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick so we could talk. “What’s up?”

  “Why’d you cut your hair?”

  Danny smiled. “Well, I met a girl. She likes it better this way.”

  “A girl made you cut your hair?”

  Danny lay on his bed and rested his hands under his head in a manner I thought self-satisfied. “It’s not like that. She didn’t make me. When you’re in love, you want to do things for the person you love.”

  “Love?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed dreamily like someone in a movie.

  My curiosity took over. “You got a picture?”

  Danny frowned. “I’ll bring one next time.”

  “What’s it like, being in love?”

  “I just feel better, like things don’t have to go wrong all the time and be so fucked up. She gets me out of my head and makes me laugh.”

  “But what’s it like?”

  Danny pondered for a second. “It’s like her happiness is my happiness. Making her happy makes me happy.”

  “I guess it’s more intense than how you love Mom and Dad?”

  Danny laughed. “More X-rated anyway.”

  My skin grew warm with embarrassment and my scalp prickled with nerves. “Is it the same thing as spiritual Love?”

  “Not sure I follow.”

  “Like spiritually elevated people… you know, people who Love everybody and everything?”

  “You mean like those blissed-out fuckers who hang around parks picking daisies and chanting?” Danny wiggled his fingers in the air and adopted a sing-song voice, “Oh, maaaan, I just loooove the flowers…. And the trees… and the sidewalks….”

  “No, not like that. See, I met this guy, Rick, and he’s been telling me about…” I couldn’t say Christianity, let alone Jesus, without sounding dorky. I stammered for a moment before fudging. “…the spiritual trip he’s been on.”

  Danny sat up a little, either intrigued or alarmed. “Which is?”

  “He’s discovered all this weird stuff in the Bible, which anyway he thinks was rewritten by the Church and people who were threatened by the real message of total, universal Love. So anyway, he’s been trying to get back to the original message.”

  “Sounds like some kinda Jesus Freak,” said Danny, wrinkling his nose with distaste.

  I’d always accepted Danny’s opinions as gold, but this time I couldn’t. “Well… yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

  Danny’s bushy eyebrows scrunched with consternation. “You shittin’ me?”

  I felt a power I’d never before possessed. I could be Trouble. “I think he’s on to something really important. Universal Love is the source of all healing, all creation, all goodness.” The feigned confidence in my voice gave me real confidence. “And the actual true message of Jesus is Love.”

  “Look,” said Danny, “I’m not sure loving everybody is even possible. But let’s say it is, just for the sake of argument. Say you Love everybody and want to make everybody happy. You got a problem right there.”

  “Why?” I crossed my arms and squinted, hoping to look more grown up.

  “You can’t please everybody. Lotta times making one person happy makes another person unhappy. You donate money to starving children in India, you’re denying money to starving children in Africa.”

  “It’s still better to help some people than no one at all,” I countered.

  “Or,” Danny was only getting started, “build a road and the people in town love it ’cause they get more visitors, but the local Indian tribe thinks you’re desecrating the land. Buy a kid who wants to be a drummer a drum set, he’s in seventh heaven, but the noise drives his parents crazy.”

  “But it’s still better to want to help everybody, even if you can’t. It’s still better not to hate people and deliberately make them miserable.”

  “Sometimes you have to hate and make people miserable,” instructed Danny. “OK, hypothetical situation. You’re in Nazi Germany just before World War II. Hitler is right in front of you, six yards away, greeting some school children for a photo op. You have a grenade. You can throw it and kill him, save the world from a war that killed fifty million people. But, if you do, you’ll kill a dozen innocent children. What do you do? Go up to Hitler and give him a hug and say, ‘Hey, Hitler you gotta love everybody!’ Or use your hate to steel yourself into killing him and the innocent kids?”

  Danny’s soulless logic deeply annoyed me, but I didn’t want to be the sort of coward who ducked difficult questions. “I’d kill Hitler and the kids, but I wouldn’t do it out of hate, I’d do it out of Love.”

  Danny was unimpressed. “Big consolation to the parents who lost their beloved children to your hand grenade.”

  �
�OK. You might have to do evil, violent things sometimes, though I think probably hardly ever, but it’s still better to always have Love for everyone in your heart.”

  “But, what if…,” Danny held his finger aloft in a pedantic pose, and paused for dramatic effect, “just what if it’s having to earn Love that makes people good? I mean, why bother helping your fellow man if you’re gonna get Loved anyway? What if people, subconsciously I mean, only behave themselves and do good deeds because they want to be Loved? If everybody Loved everybody automatically, we might all turn into selfish bastards. Humans are social animals, you know. You should try reading some psychology. Maybe I could dig up some books for you…” He looked towards his overflowing bookcase.

  I felt severely exasperated. Danny’s theories sort of made sense, but they also sounded like stuff he made up just to pop my balloon. “You can only learn so much through reading and talking,” I said evenly, in what I hoped was a sage voice. “Sometimes you have to learn by feeling and doing.”

  Danny turned back to me with a quizzical look. “So what is it you want to feel and do?”

  “It’s not about what I want,” I ad-libbed. “You can’t decide what the universe has in store for you. You gotta sit back and just let it happen.”

  Danny shook his head. “Wrong. You’re in charge of your life and your mind. Sounds like this guy Rick has been putting a lot of stupid crap in your head.”

  “Nobody’s putting anything in my head,” I snipped. “I can think for myself.” I made my voice calm again to deliver my next line. “I’ve chosen my path.”

  “I thought you just said you had to let the universe decide your fate.” Danny appeared equally exasperated.

  “Argument is the sport of fools,” I declared, marveling at my own powers of improvisation. “Truth doesn’t always fit neatly in words.”

  “I wanna meet this Rick,” grumbled Danny, looking like he wanted to pound his face in.

  I made my own face as serene as I could, no easy task since I was infuriated (how dare Danny attribute all my newly minted cosmic bromides to Rick!). “He’s actually someone I barely know. I’ve been hanging out by myself a lot lately, figuring things out. The Journey to Wisdom is lonely. I better go now, it’s time for me to meditate.” I flashed what I hoped was a cosmically compassionate smile at Danny’s still-perturbed face as I rose to leave the room. “Peace.”

  I was enjoying a late night ramble in the hills when I came upon a park consisting of a grassy glade the size of a football field encircled by woods. Lured by the absence of streetlamps (odious reminders of humanity’s relentless encroachment on nature), I wandered into the middle of the clearing and lay down on the ground. As I inhaled the lovely smell of recently mowed grass, I gazed up into the darkened night sky. There were no clouds and only a couple of stars were visible, but a gorgeous orange halo hung around the moon. I got shivers contemplating the universe. Endless, endless, endless. Love could be infinite, but could it account for the mystery of existence? How could Love create a universe? Maybe there was a God who wasn’t quite the same thing as Love. Someday I’d ask Rick.

  I held my hand up next to the moon and played tricks with perspective by closing and opening one eye. So close, so far, so close, so far. When this grew tiresome, I got up to follow a narrow dirt path into the surrounding forest. Under the canopy of leaves I lost sight of the street and imagined myself in a wilderness unspoiled by civilization, a car-less, city-less wonder-world of natural harmony. There, I was not Unpopular and Alone, but enjoying the spiritually cleansing isolation of Solitude.

  As I hiked along the path, I saw a couple of small lights floating mysteriously in the dark a few yards ahead of me. Fireflies? Faeries? Very small UFOs? Then one of the lights went out and I heard some teenage laughter. “Halt! Who goes there?” asked a male voice that I judged as belonging to someone about my age, though it was a little hard to tell through the faux-Shakespearean staginess.“ ’Tis I, Leonard,” I replied in the same affected, stentorian tone.

  “Come forth that we may see you!” demanded the voice. I walked toward the tiny light and saw five shadowy figures. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that the speaker was a Burnout named Dewey, a tall kid with shaggy hair who always wore a goofy grin. Also present were Tracey and Vicki, an inseparable pair of nearly identical Burnout girls, an Iranian exchange student named Sami, and (thank goodness because I’d never spoken to any of these other kids before) Kai. They all sat or leaned on a pair of tree logs that had fallen in a near perpendicular fashion and created a natural lounging area. Sami held out the source of the light, a joint. “Care to partake?”

  “Thanks,” I said. I took the joint and made a little sucky noise on it without inhaling and handed it back. Sami sent it on its way around the circle.

  “Who’re you?” asked Vicki, who should have remembered me from a math class we shared the previous year.

  “It’s Leonard!” said Kai, as if I should be recognized right away.

  “What brings you to the forest tonight?” asked Tracey with a giggle. Dewey had his arm around her.

  “Just walking.”

  “How come you were lying down in the middle of the field?” asked Vicki with a tinge of suspicion. “We saw you through the trees.”

  “Wanted to see the moon,” I shrugged, wishing I had a better answer.

  “Clearly someone was already stoned!” laughed Kai.

  “I’m cold,” said Tracey, who wore only a Mexican peasant blouse.

  “You want my jacket?” asked Dewey.

  Tracey shook her head and rubbed her arms. “No, I want to get out of these creepy woods.”

  Dewey stood up. “OK, amigos, what next?”

  Kai jumped up and clapped his hands together. “Joyride!” Everyone leapt to their feet. I followed Kai as he led the way out of the trees and onto the street.

  “Superfly, the only game you know is do or die,” sang Dewey, doing a poor imitation of Curtis Mayfield’s incredible falsetto.

  “I could absolutely eat an entire ham sandwich right now,” said Vicki.

  “Munchieees,” laughed Tracey.

  “Free ride… take it eas-aaaay!” sang Kai, giving an imaginary guitar a heavy thrash.

  “Bruce Lee!” cried Sami, giving the air in front of him several swift karate chops then expertly turning to inflict a sideways kick on his invisible adversary.

  I felt like I needed to say something, to be part of the group. Instinctively I knew to avoid TV, current events, or homework… Dweeb subjects. “You think the woods around here ever had any sprites or pixies or anything living in them?”

  “Man, you might wanna think about cutting back on the weed!” said Sami.

  “I am an elf,” squeaked Vicki. Everyone laughed.

  I was emboldened to go on. “There are legends of Little Folk in every culture, leprechauns, brownies, or whatever. I suspect there was probably a race of small humanoids who got driven extinct by homo sapiens.”

  “No archeological evidence to support your thesis,” contradicted Dewey. “Ergo, no Little Folk.”

  “In Iran, we have peris,” said Sami. “Little tree fairies descended from fallen angels.”

  “I’m a munchkin!” baby-voiced Vicki. Only Tracey laughed this time.

  “Zingo!” cried Kai, pointing to the fenced-in, toy-strewn backyard of a darkened house. He ran up to the gate and let himself inside. Some internal morality alarm rang in my head. Trespassing didn’t really hurt anyone, but it was disrespectful.

  Dewey shook his head and grinned. “When will the good citizens of America learn the value of locks?”

  Kai emerged holding a plastic tricycle with a hugely enlarged front wheel.

  “Big Wheel!” screamed Tracey.

  “Go ahead and wake up the whole neighborhood,” muttered Dewey. “I’ve always wanted to see what it’s like in reform school.”

  Kai climbed on, and though he was on the short side, he was still large enough to look sort of clownis
h as zipped along on the tiny bike. Everyone, me included, cracked up. Then Kai let out a mighty “Wheeeee!” and he was no longer funny but free! We were on a street with a mild slope and he built up to a pretty good speed as he pedaled down it, his long, black hair flying behind him. We all ran after. Sami and Dewey and Tracey and Vicki were calling out, “Me next, me next!” but I was dumbstruck. This was burglary, and by staying mute (and there was no chance I’d turn in my new – and only – friends), I was an accessory after the fact!

  Two blocks later, Kai came to a screeching halt, smashing into a border shrub. He got up and offered the bike to Vicki with a gentlemanly flourish of his hand. “Thanks, Kai,” said Vicki, her voice reeking of sexual flirtation. Kai just smiled and Vicki began riding the bike in circles.

  “Will it go round in circles,” sang Dewey.

  “Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky,” continued Tracey.

  “Da nah nah, da nah nah nah nah,” added Sami, filling in the horn section.

  “Do you do this often? Have you ever got caught?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Oink, oink!” laughed Kai. “I hear the police coming!”

  “Cheese it, the fuzz!” stage-whispered Dewey, imitating some old movie.

  Sami mimed the act of spraying us with gunfire. “Batatatatat!”

  “Death to the fascist insect!” yelled Tracey, pretending to shoot back.

  I racked my brain for something that would fit into this sequence, but failed, and so remained silent as Vicki let out a “Wheee!”

  A man’s voice bellowed out of a second story window. “Pipe down out there! There are children trying to sleep!” This led to several moments of uncontrollable mirth. Everyone could not stop giggling, being stoned and all. “I’m calling the cops!” came a female voice from the same window. Everyone snapped out of their giggle fit and simultaneously sprinted off, leaving the Big Wheel abandoned in the middle of the street. I followed, though I had to huff and puff to keep up. After a minute this became fun and I melted into the moment, linking telepathically to the teenage herd mind that was directing us.