CHAPTER IX: Karma Chameleon

Chapter IX: The Karma Chameleon

Buddy “Huggy” Huggington and his two younger brothers, Roman and Burton lived on the Route 1 side of The Woodlands near the old arcade plaza that is now a supermarket. Buddy could see the Yoken's whale from his bedroom window. Erin McCorley and I used to sneak out of our houses and walk the two miles up Route 1 to Buddy's house to watch porn and drink beer and play pool in his basement. It was a house without rules and thus a holy refuge. Buddy was the benevolent Pope of Route 1.

Huggy was adventurous: he drove his car onto the frozen Sagamore river and narrowly escaped when the ice broke. Huggy was an athlete: he was the one who caught a tipped pass and ran forty yards for a game winning touchdown, holding the ball up in taunting victory as he crossed the end zone. His adventures set the standard of midnight fantasy and his lies filled the vacuum of our understanding. When he said Cindy Phillips had sucked his balls, we believed him. All the girls secretly said he was so fine, and wrote “I love Buddy Huggington on their Trapper Keepers, so why wouldn't she suck his balls? When he said he had stuck three fingers in Chrissy, we asked to sniff them. When he said Amanda “Loose” Laurent had sucked the contents out of the rubber he had been wearing, we acted like we were disgusted, but Buddy knew we were jealous. His fashion (French rolled stone-washed jeans and T-shirt worn inside-out) and fast phrases (“Hey, Monkey Man.”; “Get him a body bag!”; “Nobody likes a snitch.”) were repeated until they became the standard.

“Oggy,” he'd say as we played video games in his basement, “you've got to use this Sun In. Just put some blonde streaks on the side. It'll be the best. Try it, monkey man. Just try it. I did. Chicks love it. Darcy told me that you'd look better as a blonde. Yeah. Get him a body bag, Oggy! You'll be so good lookin' that I'd fahk ya.”

So you looked even more pathetic with orange streaks in your hair as you lay in your bed masturbating at night. What else did our friend Huggy do?

Then there was Buddy's dark side: When Erin's wallet vanished after a drinking binge, we were sure Buddy was at Gillies spending the money on chili dogs. It was funny, unless you were Erin. Good old Huggy! That crazy kid! What a clown! But when a rumor was spread that positively identified me and Cristo on Pierce Island, in the bushes, with our pants down, I wasn't laughing. I was confident that Buddy had started it, but I could only grin and meekly deny it. “Shucks, Huggy, you know that isn't true.” And when “Spaz” Bunson was hit in the back with a small piece of shit while he took a shower in the High School locker room, he didn't have to look further than Buddy's stained hands and grinning lips, nor could he do anything except wash himself again. These and other incidents tested, but never broke, our allegiance to Buddy Huggington.

Huggy was always hated by at least one person but never by the whole crowd. The laws of high school conformity naturally demanded silence from the solitary victim. If “Loose” Amanda had been thoroughly humiliated by Huggy's ultimate betrayal then what could she do? She was just one girl with an ass as wide as a shopping cart. Her social credit at school was very conditional and it was better if she just kept her mouth shut and try to rebuild her shattered image. If Cristo found his shorts around his ankles in front of the whole senior class then he could only laugh at himself and shuffle off the stage. Was he going to confront Huggy and risk total social banishment? Never. If it was funny to everyone watching, and it usually was, then the victim was left with no response. Huggy understood that as long as he kept the majority of the school on his side then he could do absolutely anything to minority.

Thus, Huggy became the older brother I wanted to have, the keeper of forbidden pleasures. Unlike brooklyn, Huggy always made time to humiliate me. He made me believe I could be as tough and brave as him. Huggy taught me to shred cheese in my Ramen noodles and fry onions in butter as a garnish, and while I was cooking he was stealing change from my Red Sox baseball coin bank. He also showed me how to pack Cristo's sister's Cabbage Patch Doll with firecrackers and detonate it at the Little League field. Later, Huggy shoplifted my first bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 from the drug store and made me feel like a man as I puked in the alley behind Gillies. He had danced and laughed as I fell into the puddle of my own excreta. This awful drunkenness was not, as I had been led to believe by my-M-M-Max Headroom,” stuttered Buddy. “Huh? You want some of the Buddy Twins? Is this what you want?”

Buddy pointed to his flexed biceps and bounced like a boxer. Then he suddenly punched Mikey on the side of the head, yelling, “Get him a body bag, Johnny! No Mercy!”

Mikey fell to one knee, dazed and blubbering. His chin started to tremble.

“That…that’s what feels hurts. I hurt it,” he babbled.

I put a foot on his back and pushed him the rest of the way to the ground. I was disappointed when I realized Buddy was now watching a girl jog down the industrial park road.

“Huggy! Hey, Huggy! I pushed him with my foot and he fell down. Look! Get him a body bag!”

“Nice, Oggy,” said Buddy, but he was still distracted by the girl. Curse her! He watched her jog away until he heard Mikey cry out pitifully.

“Why? You’re my friends. Why? I was good this time. I brought my car. I did good.”

Buddy answered with pure disgust, “We aren’t your friends, you retarded fahk. We don’t care about you. We don’t care about your baby.”

This last comment had nothing to do with Mikey’s familial status, rather it was a direct quote from the Charles Manson tribute movie Helter Skelter, and was a current catch phrase of ours that could refer to anything beneath our concern. There was no worse insult then to say we didn't care about your baby, and I was deeply envious that Buddy had thought to use the quote before me. How could he be so quick-witted? Still, I repeated it with not quite the right phrasing and attitude.

“Yeah. That's right. We don’t care about you or your baby. Huggy doesn't care, and I don't care! We just don’t care! Look at us not caring about you or your baby!”

Huggy again ignored me as he faked a punch at Mikey, who flinched and then curled up in the dirt.

“It feels hurts. That’s what hurts,” he said, though the punch never connected.

I spit on him and watched with pleasure as Buddy finally smiled approvingly. I had done good.

“We still don't care about you or your baby,” I said as I picked up Mikey's toy car and threw it into the nearby woods. Huggy now beamed like a proud father.

“Get 'im, Oggy. Nice. Get that retarded stutter-fahk. No Mercy!”

We left Mikey in the dirt and laughed all the way to Gillies, where we bought chili cheese dogs and hamburgers and ate them in Prescott Park overlooking the Chickanoosuc River.

“Gee, this job shore is hard to figger out,” Buddy said in an imitation of Mikey. “I wunder if I could be any more stupid? What do yew think, Oggy?”

I took my Sox hat off and scratched my head.

“Well, shit, Mikey. I don't know. Oops! I just got my hand caught in the binding machine again. Durn it. That makes the fourth time today. Ain't no slacking on this job. Do you think the boss will miss the two hundred Hustlers I stole?”

“No, sir. I do believe he'll be too busy looking for next month's shipping invoices that I shredded.”

While I was laughing, Buddy took the unfinished half of my chili cheese dog and threw it into the river where it was instantly attacked by starving seagulls.

I stopped laughing. I loved chili cheese dogs from Gillies as much as I loved watching Dwight Evans toss a baseball.

“Hey! I wasn't finished with that, Buddy. Friggin' asshole! Why did...”

“Shut your pie, ya big baby,” spit Buddy. “I paid for that hot dog.”

“But...” I stammered.

“Here, take a swim, Jim Rice.”

Huggy took my Red Sox hat off and, before I could react, he whipped it over the fence into the river near the crumbs of my hot dog bun. I had no choice but to jump in after it before it sank or was swept out to sea or carried off by a seagull. As I hopped over the fence, fully dressed, I caught a blurry glimpse of Huggy laughing as double-cheese burger juice dripped down his chin.

“I'm just kidding,” he cackled.

The difference between a friend and an enemy was a line in the dirt that Huggy had rubbed out and pissed on until the roles overlapped. Whether he laughed at me or with me was impossible to tell. Maybe he was ‘just kidding’ when he urinated in my school locker. Could I blame him for wanting to have a little fun at my expense? When he threw all my camping equipment on a fire at Ogden's Point, what could I do but laugh. Everyone else was laughing. When I found a bottle of piss poured onto the seat of my VW Rabbit one morning, I had to chuckle. What goes around comes around.

Buddy laughed as though he had no conscience and I was gripped by jealousy a moment before I hit the frigid water. When I climbed out of the river ten minutes later with my dripping Red Sox cap on my head I accidentally got some water on his shoes.

“Tool!” he yelled and pointed toward Pierce Island, “Go drip dry with the other queers.”

I did not hesitate to apologize and take two steps back. I worshipped Buddy and like any good devotee I loved him most when he hurt me.

The salt water smell of the river and the remains of my unfinished chili cheese dog remained in the sweatband of my hat and was no less comforting than Darcy’s vaseline greased sock and her shiny yearbook picture.

The streets in The Woodlands were designed to minimize stop signs by routing traffic together with merges and triangles. There were no intersections, just branches off of branches, one merge after another. Vance liked this because he could speed recklessly in and out of the triangles. I liked it because the danger confused the Timewraiths and most of The Woodlands was a still a mystery to me so the Timewraiths could harness few memories. Sometimes Vance drove on lawns. Sometimes I saw a cat or the occasional raccoon dart in front of the car lights.

After ten or twenty minutes of terrifying recklessness Vance stopped at an all night gas station near the forestry plantation and went to piss behind a dumpster. I had an urge to get out and change our tires for racing slicks. Instead I thought about Mikey's toy car. Could I find it and give it back to him, return it as a gesture of kindness? But what would Huggy think if he ever found out? Soon Vance returned drinking the ex-alcoholics cocktail, black coffee and a cigarette. He squinted at me through a cloud.

“Here.”

He tossed a cellophane package through the air. I caught it.

“A Twinkie?”

“All the essential vitamins and minerals,” Vance informed me.

“Sure, if you consider corn syrup a mineral.”

“Look, I only had a buck, Ogden. When I make a million dollars I get you your organic nuts and raisins or whatever you like. For now, eat your fahking Twinkie.”

I thanked Vance with a forced smile and started to tug the cream filled sponge cake delight out of the cellophane. Vance blew on the top of his coffee and asked, “Ready to...?”

Just then, a white 1987 Ford Fiero pulled in and stopped next to me at the pump. The plastic body was impervious to rust, but I could hear the undercarriage squeak with the cries of a million memories. This was Death's carriage, driven by the King of The Timewraiths. Toddy Bonigan had found me.

“Remember our deal? History doesn't teach itself, Oggy. You scratch my back I'll scratch yours.”

Why did you do it? Why can't I be free?

“Because history doesn't teach itself.”

But it isn't our history.

“It is now.”