The Conductor.lunch hour blues

LUNCH HOUR BLUES

Lunch was one of those times that the whole of the student body seemed to have to mingle with each other for basic survival. I suppose the other times would’ve been assemblies and graduation but those however lacked a driving force, and embodied just a basic mind-numbing boredom in general. During the hour ten minutes that lunch was daily, every single living thing on campus was all moving towards one goal: sustenance.

Most ate from the canteen, though still a great number braved the cafeteria, and of course there were those who left campus to eat at the McDonalds over on Colorado Boulevard just beneath the freeway overpass that was a good couple miles away. Had to have a car, really, to get there and back in time to hit sixth period, if you cared that much. Wasn’t difficult to come by, a car, then, but most of the poor kids would still sprint over there for a shake and some lard-injected french fries. It was funny watching ‘em try to beat the late bell back. You could almost hear the crack of a starting gun at 12:55 each day over at the Sierra Madre and Colorado stoplight.

Like I said, lunch was probably the only time the whole of the student body absolutely had to step near one another. I had to brave the masses to eat, no matter how much I hated them. A pair of dark sunglasses and well hidden headphones helped tremendously though.

It wasn’t that I hated anyone in particular. I hated everyone as a whole. Not just the cheerleaders practicing in those little red and white pleated things they called skirts. What they called practicing, I had decided, was a subliminal version of the mating dance bees do, except more blatant and vulgar. A lot more vulgar. I’m sure this wasn’t a new thing, but humping the air to “Pump Up The Jam” in tiny little outfits surely didn’t seem to lift anything but the male genitalia. I suppose the promise of sex managed to push even the dimmest varsity member to their peak of athletic performance.

And I didn’t just hate the Hippies either, over in the grass twanging away on cheap particle board acoustic guitars they found in the alley behind the Ice House. Dressed in filthy denim jeans and old Birkenstocks their parents gave them. Their idea of being a hippie had to do ultimately with free drugs and free sex and protesting anything that wasn’t made from hemp. Reminded me of the bums asking for change on the freeway off-ramp.

It was a well-rounded hatred of all and everything. Kind of like a pure disinterest and disgust of what passed as human intelligence and common courtesy. I hated everyone, including myself. But that little quirk was something for Doctor Demon to figure out.

A few days after my first meeting with Damian, I sat on what used to be a planter right next to the canteen during lunch, inspecting the peaks and valleys of the chocolate flavored icing on one of my Zingers.

Zingers were kind of like the poor man’s Hostess Cup Cake and Twinkie wrapped up into one. You could peel off the icing from the oblong sponge cake and eat it like taffy. About the same consistency in some cases. They came hermetically sealed in brittle-thin clear plastic, big red slick lettering diagonal on the front, two to a pack. Three flavors: lemon, chocolate and the red and white ones which I think was strawberry and coconut, but who would know by the taste. They called those Tiger Tails. I think they’ve been discontinued though, maybe the red dye #66 was causing mutations in young teens who ate these by the dozen. Who knows?

The canteen sold these along with other horrendous junk food: sticky cinnamon buns from a Mexican bakery in downtown L.A., Funyuns, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Cool Ranch Doritos, gooey cookies, ham and cheese croissants, something supposed to be like the Egg McMuffin, greasy french fries and other healthless forms of victuals for restless starving teenage bodies.

There were also about 8 soda machines deposited around campus, offering up chilled caffeinated carbonated beverages of the naughty type: Cherry Coke, Cactus Cooler, Dr. Pepper, what have ya. This was back when ‘healthy’ wasn’t a word used anywhere in school but maybe Health Class, and even then you were pushing it. You got something akin to meat of some kind in the cafeteria, but I doubted if any of it wasn’t over-processed into oblivion before reaching the kitchen itself.

My steady diet consisted of a package of those chocolate flavored Zingers, three cans of Cherry Coke and however many Marlborro’s I could inhale in the remaining twenty minutes of the lunch hour. No breakfast. And dinner was another few cans of Coke and some kind of burger from somewhere if I had the money. It’s what made me a champion of insomniac teen angst poetry rivaling that of Henry Rollins, I believed.  

So I was sitting on the dead dirt-filled planter of old pine that ran the length along the side of the canteen. Two cans of condensation-covered Cherry Coke before me, a Zinger in my hand, and my cigarettes lovingly cradled in the inside pocket of my jacket. For some reason I always looked for the cracks and imperfections in the ridges of frosting, trying to imagine the defect or missing tooth in the piece of machinery that cranked out this stuff.

My mind did a little skip to the counselor, wondering what he’d make of the peaks and valleys of a faux-chocolate skin of a preservative lunch. Grey eyes flashing in my memory. Always made my stomach kind of nervous when I thought about his eyes.  

From the first session, I felt that Doctor Demon was pretty cool actually. He was a nice guy, warm, friendly, weird, and he didn’t conform to the faculty. For that, I could relate to him. He was like a friend in a way, and yet there was still that underlying risk I could feel that made it all edgy and raw. I wrote it off as that I’d never really trusted anyone this much and that I was the one that was creating the dangerous feeling.  

“Hey Vampirella!” Caleb’s bulky shadow fell over me like a consuming storm and I felt my heart drop. “Whaterya starin’ at, huh, freak?”

Caleb was the star tackle of the football team. A towering brick wall of a guy, he had interesting looks for a tackle. He almost looked like a Malibu Ken doll, if you didn’t take into account his width. His eyes were that killer blue, his hair that surfer blond shag, and chiseled features, all of which had every cheerleader fawning after him like sick puppies.

I looked up at him and his roving gang of jock friends, all nearly half his size for some reason. He stood over me, a smirk on his lips, his letterman’s jacket of red and white impeccably clean. I repressed a sigh of annoyance, it showing up as my lips pursing tightly together. His buddies snickered at me.

Caleb then snatched the Zinger from my hand and devoured it in a single bite. He chewed like a cow, black cake smearing across his teeth.

Caleb was one of those guys that was all muscle and absolutely no brain. The guy was flunking out of everything but gym. But he was practically hand-picked for every highfalutin’ college in the state for his status on the football team, our Mighty Bulldogs–I’ll tell you though that the mural painted on the side of the auditorium of Stanford, our mascot, looked more like a steroid-pumped Pug than a mighty Bulldog–. I swear, the kid was gonna be the dumbest student to ever graduate with honors from USC.

He stood grinning crookedly down at me, his hooligan friends sniggering and ridiculing me behind him. I squinted behind my sunglasses in the bright noonday sun.

“Ah Caleb. The farmers didn’t slop you hogs today?” Joking at the packs expense, I smiled gently.

“Whatever Vampirella.” He made a hideous face at me, grabbing the second Zinger from it’s place on the packaging before me. “You’re just jealous ‘cause you couldn’t get a prime cut of meat like me if you walked around here naked yelling freeshow.” He crammed the thing into his mouth.

“Don’t flatter yourself, meathead. I wouldn’t want any kind of pig that looks as rancid as you do.” I kept my smile on.

Caleb’s mouth turned down and he stepped towards me, puffing up his chest and shoulders like he was about to charge an opponent. “You better watch your mouth, bitch.” He grunted around the Zinger.

“Bite me, motherfucker.” I sneered.

“You wish, bitch!” His big mitt of a hand smacked the side of my head like a slab of room-temperature porterhouse with enough force to knock me off balance.

I somehow landed on one knee before him on the ground. They laughed at me. Caleb made a lewd movement with his hips, the position he stood in before me creating the illusion I was about to give him a blow job. I jerked myself backward in disgust and sat back against the planter. Everyone in the quad who’d seen this whole display laughed and pointed. Like a king, Caleb made a ludicrously regal wave of his hand to the quad. The jocks laughed louder and then the lot of them walked away to humiliate some other poor sap.

Cursing him beneath my breath, I felt slightly paralyzed to move from all the ridiculing eyes on me. My face was hot with embarrassment and rage. His slap wasn’t enough to actually hurt really so much as it just gave me a headache.

The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly raised up on end, like I’d just experienced a chilling breeze. I looked up through crowds of faceless students just in time to catch Damian’s long face in the distance watching me. He stood near the entrance to building A1-AL, long arms crossed over his chest, a black and white photograph against all the nervous color. His grey eyes glinted like polished steel in the sky, I was almost certain that they could be seen for miles. His face seemed stern as he stared at me and I knew that he’d probably seen the whole thing. My face flushed immediately, mortification yanking my eyes away quickly.

I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my remaining cans of Coke and my backpack and bolted, hearing the cheerleaders laughing behind me. My throat had knotted up into a sick tight ball of self-loathing and I couldn’t stand to be near anyone. I hated how horrible I felt and I hated Caleb and his ego and his stupid friends. And I hated that I could still see Damian’s eyes glaring at me from across the quad.

I went, head-down, back behind the drama theater, into a well where the stage-entrance was, all chained up and locked.

I stayed there until well beyond the late bell, chain-smoking, angrily smearing away hot ireful tears and wishing I had the courage to just kill myself.