19. Cool Kids

We were in art class, painting political posters. I was sitting at the George McGovern table. There were three of us there. There were two kids at the Richard Nixon table. The rest of the class was at what our art teacher, Mr. Reiss, called the “Silent Majority Table.” At the start of class, Mr. Reiss had asked us who we would vote for if we could vote, and when hardly anyone raised their hands he’d gotten very angry. “All right,” he said. “You all want to be ignorant, go ahead. You can sit there and think nothing and do nothing. That’s exactly perfect for this country.”

Mr. Reiss wouldn’t even let the silent majority table people do free drawing. They just had to sit and be silent.

I didn’t know much about George McGovern, but I knew I would vote for him. I’d overheard my parents talking one night, and they’d been saying how they both voted for Nixon in 1968 and thought it was the worst mistake of their lives. My father said he didn’t like McGovern very much, but anyone, anyone, had to be better than Nixon. My mother said McGovern wasn’t so bad.

“And when he said, like, ‘squeal like a pig,’ that was so sick, I thought I would throw up,” one of the other kids at the George McGovern table said. This other kid’s name was Steven Pelton. “That was one fucking sick movie.”

“Creepy, though,” the third kid at the table, Dave Owen, answered. “That kid with banjo, he was fucking creepy.”

Steven Pelton and Dave Owen were cool kids. They dressed in the best clothes, went to parties on weekends given by their older brothers. They drew motorcycles on their notebooks and coasted by in class without doing much work. Even the teachers liked them. They were also the best looking boys in class. Dave Owen in particular had these feminine good looks, like a singer, like Bobby Sherman. All the girls were crazy about him.

Normally I wouldn’t have tried to talk to them, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You guys saw ‘Deliverance’?” I asked.

“Yeah. You see it?”

“No. But I read about it. I read the review in the Times. How did you ever get your parents to take you to that?”

Dave Owen laughed. “My fucking parents. My fucking parents wouldn’t take me to see fucking Bambi.”

Dave Owen said “fuck” a lot, but it always seemed to fit with what he was saying, and he seemed able to say it only when there were no teachers in earshot.

“Did you sneak in?”

“Nah, our friend Bob Decker took us,” Steve Pelton said. “He takes us everywhere.”

“Who’s Bob Decker? Does he go to school here?”

This time they both laughed. “Bob’s not in school,” Steve Pelton said. “He’s older. He’s got his own apartment. He’s got a great stereo, but all he ever plays are the fucking Beatles.”

“You’ve been to his apartment?”

“A few times,” Dave Owen said. I noticed his poster had Richard Nixon’s face, which he’d cut out from a magazine, with a big X through it, and then all kinds of red splotches around it.

“Where’d you meet him?”

“My father works with him,” Steve Pelton said.

“Does your father come with you when you go out with him?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” Dave Owen answered. “Old Bob Decker takes us out all on our own. He takes us any-fucking-where we want to go. All we have to do is call him up and say, ‘Hey Bob Decker, we feel like hanging out at Jamesway,” and he comes driving over and picks us up somewhere. He’ll buy us ice cream, whatever.”

“He gave us beers once,” Steve Pelton said. “At his apartment.”

“You should be…careful,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want them to make fun of me.

Both Steve Pelton and Dave Owen snorted with laughter. “Yeah, we know,” Dave Owen said. “We know that old Bob Decker probably wants to suck our fucking dicks or something. That’s why we can make him do anything we want.”

“One time Dave made him let me drive his car,” Steve Pelton said. “He told Bob Decker he’d tell my father that we’d gone to the movies with me. I don’t think my father would have minded, but Bob Decker just wigged out.”

“He’s not all bad, though,” Dave Owen said. “He says he was at Woodstock. Which may be total bullshit, but he tells some good stories about it. Drugs. Mud.”

“Does he give you drugs?” I asked. Something about the conversation made me feel like I could ask anything. I got the sense that Steve and Dave had been dying to talk to someone, someone not each other, about this. None of us were working on our political posters anymore.

“Nah,” Dave Owen said. “Just those beers that one time. And only one beer each. He wouldn’t give us any more than that.”

“We’ll probably get him to give us more sometime,” Steven Pelton said. “Or at least buy some for us.”

“Probably,” Dave Owen said. “He’s got a poster in his bathroom. Isn’t that cool? It’s like a cartoon poster, of a girl driving in a car, with her hair flying back. It takes up almost the whole wall.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any more questions.

“He said he’d try to get us into Clockwork Orange this weekend,” Steven Pelton said.  “It’s playing in Newburgh.”

“You know Clockwork Orange, Newsome?” Dave Owen asked.

I nodded. “I’ve seen the ad. It looks awesome.”

Dave and Steve exchanged a glance. “You want to go? I’ll be Bob Decker wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“He’s really not that bad. It’s sort of cool to be around an adult you can boss around. Say anything you fucking want to.”

I nodded no again, quickly. I looked down at my poster. It wasn’t much of a poster, just words, statistics about Vietnam I was copying from a magazine. I was going to write “McGovern Can Save Us” along the bottom, as the tagline.

“No problem,” Dave Owen said, and he was making his voice a teasing voice now, as though the offer had never been real. “We probably won’t get in anyway. That movie is rated fucking X.”