John James Abert, who headed the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, the agency charged with exploring and mapping the west. At West Point the son collected an astonishing number of demerits and stood near the bottom of his class in all but drawing, where he ranked first. His fellow West Pointers included Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry W. Halleck and others who became Civil War luminaries. Bob Dollar’s heart went out to Lieutenant Abert, surrounded by military bullies, sissy drawing his only skill. The lieutenant was Bob Dollar’s age when he and his friend and second-in-command, the mathematically inclined Lieutenant William Guy Peck, and a small company were ordered by the idiosyncratic and haughty John Charles Frémont to separate from the larger expedition and form the “South Expedition” to explore the territory of the Comanche, and chart the course of the Canadian River while Frémont himself pushed on to sunny California. Bob found the journal interesting, for Abert had an inquiring eye, a good nature, and he was early in the country.
The bed was heaped with puffy quilts and featherbeds, so infernally hot that he ended by kicking them all on the floor and directing the fan’s stream of air at the bed. When he woke at dawn the sheets were twisted into frightful points and kinked spirals like aging telephone cords. He showered, pulled on his jeans and T-shirt. He couldn’t get away from the place fast enough. The white van was gone.
In every installment of life’s book, Bob Dollar knew, even when he was fourteen, there was a fat boy; someone’s brother or school pal, the son of a deli owner, a youth aiming his life at building a low-rider, a discontent slagged out on some sofa with a can of Yoo-Hoo in hand, the one member of the gang the police catch, the fountain of knowledge at the porno video shop, the champion pizza maker at Benny’s Underground Pie Parlor. He encountered his fat boy in Walgreens while waiting in line for one of his uncle’s pain prescriptions. In front of him stood a suety person of sixteen, his round head bound in a black cloth imprinted with skulls and crossbones, his chin decorated with seventy or eighty pale blond whiskers and an assortment of pimples. He was wearing overalls with enormous legs – each large enough to contain a burly man – standing sidewise in line and addressing a pregnant woman waiting on a plastic chair. His sweatshirt sleeves were so long he had torn little holes at the cuff seams and from these holes his thumbs protruded, the cuffs themselves like fingerless mitts over his warty hands. He was not like other fat boys. He was not jolly, he did not smile appeasingly his eyes were not naïve and innocent. Bob Dollar knew instinctively that this was an evil fat boy. At once he took an ardent liking to him. He liked the fat boy because he was unlikable.
The fat boy spoke to the woman on the chair. “They had me in a wrestle hold in Kansas City. It was one of the most dangerous holds. They almost killed me. I don’t know how I escaped, but I’m standing here, ain’t I, waiting in line like anybody else? And that was last year. They couldn’t do it now, because I’d kill them. I’d break their backs. And one of them was my best friend. But he is not my best friend now. He’s my ex-best friend. We did some things together. One time when we were little we borrowed his mother’s crème brûlée torch and melted the gumball machine, and the gumballs all came out on the floor, and they were rolling around and we picked them up and man, they were hot. Worse than hot, they were boiling, they stuck to our hands and burned them. See, I got gumball scars right here.” He held out his palm for inspection, displaying puckered circles.
“That was my ex-best friend Mark who built a rocket launcher when he was thirteen. He was into wrecking things, me too, and that’s probably why we were best friends. His aunt had all these old vinyl records, weird jazz stuff, and we threw them in the air and then bashed them with baseball bats. Mark had three baseball bats but he never played baseball, just bashed things. If I saw him now I would bash him. But he’s safe, he’s safe because he’s in Kansas City and I’m here. And he plays the guitar but he’s not very good. He doesn’t want to be good. He wants to be loud. And he’s got like these weird metal gloves that his grandfather gave him. His grandfather went to England to see the Tower of London and he brought back these metal gloves and Mark put them on and got his hand stuck in one. They had to take him to the emergency room in Kansas City and he was on television getting it taken off. The reason his grandfather gave him the gloves was to keep him from playing the guitar. That was the deal, ‘I give you these English metal gloves and you not play that fucking guitar.’ Excuse me, miss, that was Mark’s grandfather talking, not me.”
The woman on the chair stared at him with an expression of distaste but said nothing. Bob wanted to say that his uncle’s roommate had been put off a plane in Kansas City but as he opened his mouth the druggist, with great heavy eyes which Bob thought sensual, came to the counter and spoke to the fat boy.
“Orlando, did Dr. Tungsten give you some samples? I can’t fill your prescription. The doctor didn’t sign it.”
“What? No, he didn’t give me samples! Just the prescription and he said, ‘Get it filled right away.’ He didn’t sign it? What a jerk.”
“Do you want me to call him?”
“Hell no, I’m going back over there,” said Orlando, taking the prescription from her hand and heading briskly for the door.
When he was out of sight the clerk dialed the telephone and spoke to someone. “This is Ruby Voltaire, the pharmacist down at Young’s? I had an Orlando Bunnel, claims to be a patient of Dr. Tungsten’s, in here just now with a prescription for Viacomdex but it wasn’t signed. So I’m not sure what the story is. Oh? Uh-huh. O.K. O.K.”
The other clerk looked at Bob Dollar and said, “Your uncle’s prescription is ready.”
“He wants you to put it on his bill.” He took the container and sprinted for the door.
In grade school he had had friends, but his freshman year in high school was one of oppression, loneliness and a sense of being an outcast, in part, he was sure, because he wore cast-off garments from Uncle Tam’s shop. A month into his sophomore year he tried to explain the situation to his uncle.
“I didn’t make many friends last year,” he said, “but I thought it was because I was a freshman. And I thought it would be different this year. But I am still out of it. I try to be nice to everybody but nobody is nice to me. I just don’t know how to make people like me. And they make fun of my clothes.”
But Uncle Tam was not helpful. “Aw, what do you care? They’re just punks.”
After Orlando’s advent Bob did not care.
He could see the fat boy at the bus stop two blocks west. He looked up the street and in the distance saw the flat face of the bus, no larger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. He began to run toward the bus stop, made it with the bus still blocks away.
“Hi,” he said to the fat boy, who looked at him hard.
“You were in the drugstore,” he said.
“Yeah.”
They said nothing more until they were on the bus.
“Where do you go to school?” asked Bob Dollar.
“School! I don’t honor them with my presence. I fucking quit school.”
“Wow. Your parents let you quit?”
“Of course they let me quit. The alternative was handcuffs and forcible transport.
