Kool Brother Rat Read online

Mike De Leon’s apartment.

  Mike’s mom, a weathered Southern belle, greeted me at the door as if I were royalty. She lived alone with Mike and had her hands full with him, and I knew she considered me a good influence on him. “Oh, Mi–key!” she trilled. “It’s Bobby Stein-metz!” All the curtains in the living room were drawn, and the only light came from Divorce Court on the TV. Mike stepped into the room like a prisoner summoned by the warden, and stood there with his hands crossed before him. “Hi,” he said; he didn’t actually say “hi,” but slowly raised one eyebrow, which was his way of saying “hi.” “Hi,” I said (out loud). Mike raised one side of his mouth in an Elvis sneer. The thing about Mike was, he never raised both eyebrows at once, or both sides of his mouth at once to smile. There was always something off-center about him, some suggestion that he, like Susie Margolis, knew things beyond his years, but that the things he knew were things I wouldn’t want to know. “Want to go do stuff?” I asked. He thought about it for a moment, then pursed his lips and nodded. His mother had been standing between us with her hands clasped, anxiously following our exchange; but the uncertainty of our plan alarmed her, and she blurted, “Do what stuff, Bobby! What stuff?” “Just ride our bikes,” I shrugged, glancing at Mike, who nodded to indicate I’d done well. “Will you be needing any milk from the store, Mother?” Mike asked. His mom always said she was raising Mike to be a proper Southern gentleman, but she wasn’t buying that crap. “Just be home by supper,” she said tartly. Then she buttoned the top three buttons of Mike’s shirt and whispered something into his ear, and gave the ear a tug that made Mike wince.

  “What’s up?” Mike asked as we rode our bikes down the street. He was flying from the house.

  “I wanna go shoplifting,” I said. “Whoa,” said Mike, skidding to a stop. “You wanna lift?” Mike and I had been casual friends for a few years because we both liked regular boy stuff like tackle football and bike racing, but there was a gulf between us because I never went along with his wilder schemes. “Yeah,” I said. Mike’s blue eyes gleamed. “Well alright, Steinmetz! Follow me.” We rode our bikes to Pico Boulevard and parked them around the corner from the Dime Store. I’d been going there for years to buy baseball cards. “No need to pay today,” I joked. “You’re right about that, Steiny boy,” said Mike. There was a back door opening onto the parking lot, and a front door to the street. The register was by the back door, and since it was Sunday, there was a mob of kids buying candy and comics. Mike and I entered separately, and then, per his plan, we stood on opposite sides of the mob. Mike had said he’d start a diversion, but I was so shocked when he shoved a skinny kid with glasses that I just stood there while the woman behind the register watched events unfold: the shoved kid said “Hey!” with some trepidation, then Mike said “Sorry man, accident,” and started brushing off the shoved kid’s shirt; and he had the presence of mind to shoot me a look to remind me to do my job–he was a natural born leader, like a good quarterback. So I found my nerve and grabbed a handful of packs of baseball cards, and dropped my hand to my side and walked out, and kept walking without looking back until I reached our bikes around the corner. I rode as fast as I could all the way to the 76 Station two blocks down. Mike met me there next to the dumpster a few minutes later. “Man, that was cool!” I said, my heart still pounding from the excitement. Mike shook his head pitifully. I believe he agreed it was cool, but felt it was against his code to say so; or, maybe, shoplifting had just became a job to him. Whatever the reason, he just said: “Wha’d you get?” I showed him the five packs of cards I’d swiped, and told him I was dying to open them. He grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” he said. “We’ll sell `em and split the money.” Sell `em? Selling baseball cards was a concept I’d never heard of. Baseball cards were for gazing at, for putting in order, for loving; but selling? Never.

  “What do you want to do now?” I sighed.

  “Let’s go over to the school. There’s something there that’ll blow your mind.”

  John Burroughs Junior High was, in a sense, the most well-known school in the country because TV producers used a stock shot of its brick facade to establish a school setting in every show from Room 222 to, yes, The Brady Bunch. I followed Mike on bike to the side of the school. We hid our bikes behind some bushes and edged along the side of the building behind the bushes. “You can’t tell anybody,” Mike said, and I knew I’d better not. Mike removed a grill from the wall that vented the crawl space beneath the school. He climbed feet-first halfway through and signaled me to follow. I lowered myself after him and–whoa. There was the glow of a bunch of candles, and a bunch of guys were sitting on crates playing cards. They were a rogue’s gallery of all the guys who used to get in trouble in elementary school. There were Rafi and Dirk Nimsky, oldest of the four Nimsky brothers, unibrow blockheaded bullies who were two years apart in age and who looked like an evil version of Russian nesting dolls when they lined up against the chain link fence in the playground waiting to shake down kids for pocket change; Marcus Burgess, a tall hyper-kinetic blond scarecrow who always got Fs and who was constantly suspended for reasons unknown; and Richard Horowitz, who reportedly bragged about torturing cats with pen knives, though no one knew if he really did. “Whoa,” I said. “What is this, Club Fire Trap?” I was trying to warn them in a humorous way that they could burn the school down–there must have been two dozen candles loosely set in melted wax atop crates. They looked up at me with expressions ranging from hostile to blank, and Mike assured them: “He’s cool. We were just lifting stuff at the Dime Store. Show `em what you kiped, Steiny.” So I placed the five packs of baseball cards on the crate they were using as a card table. They fingered the unopened packs like jewelers. “Hey,” I said, “it’s like the Artful Dodger down here, like that scene in Oliver where they go through the stolen stuff.”

  Rafi Nimsky winced. “You saw Oliver?”

  “No! I mean, a few scenes. I had to. My family went. You know how it is with family dragging you around, right? And hey, you’re right, man, it’s a really wimpy flick; but the cool thing is, all it is is just a fluffy Hollywood version of a really cool story by Dickens–Oliver Twist.” They were all wincing now, as if some stench was coming from me.

  “Oliver Twist?” This time Marcus Burgess was peering at me.

  “Yeah. I know it sounds like boring school stuff, but it was a really cool, subversive story about these pickpockets in London.” I thought I saw a glimmer of interest when I said “pickpockets,” so I kept going. “It was written by the same author-guy that wrote A Christmas Carol, which also had a great scene about thieves in London, and they all met in a dark cave or something–like this place–and they traded all the stuff they stole.” They traded glances, and I added, “They were drinking booze in that scene, too. It was cool.”

  “You can be our librarian,” Richard Horowitz chortled, and Mike asked me to sit down: “Shut up and sit down,” was how he put it. So I sat down and decided to shut up and soak up the atmosphere. I’d always wondered what guys like this talked about among themselves. I sat on a crate while they played cards and smoked cigarettes, and no one said anything for quite some time. Finally Dirk Nimsky said to me, “You should have swiped some comics–then we could read `em.”

  “Maybe next time,” I said. “Man, it was great. Mike created a diversion, and I was able to swipe these packs and sneak out.”

  They weren’t impressed. “You should’ve swiped something we could sell,” Rafi Nimsky said. So Mike reached into the pocket of his black leather jacket and laid a shiny golden watch on the card table. It still had the price tag from the Dime Store on it. “Twenty bucks,” said Rafi with approval. Mike’s accomplishment and dramatic flair made me think of humming the song “Leader Of The Pack,” but I decided to keep my mouth shut. “Right on,” said Richard Horowitz.

  “For sure,” I said, which made Rafi grimace. “So, what do you guys do down here?” It was a dumb question, since I was seeing what they did down the
re; but I was getting sick of the silence.

  “We read library books,” Richard Horowitz chortled.

  “Well, it’s righteous down here,” I said. They went back to their cards. “Hey,” I said, “this is pretty ironic, all this talk about libraries, and we’re under the damned library right now!”

  They all ignored that, except for Rafi Nimsky, who blew smoke near my face.

  “This sure is subversive,” I said, “doing all these things you can’t do in school, like smoking and playing cards–right underneath the school.”

  Marcus Burgess glared at me. “You know, we all know you think you’re really smart with your big words and all, but we all know subversive means underground, so stuff it.”

  “I don’t think I’m smart,” I said. “I hate school. I hate algebra, and I hate the fascist way they teach history, and the gym teachers are totally fascist. Well, English is alright, I guess, at least when you get into Huck Finn and all his cutting up, and all that Dickens stuff about thieves and pickpockets and all–that’s pretty cool.” They didn’t even hear the last thing I’d said. They’d all