Shooting Stars Read online

  “You didn’t tell me what you’re going to school for,” he says.

  Of course I didn’t. I don’t like or know you. “You know, I’m not sure yet. Kind of hoping Mr. Jenko can help me out with that.”

  “Oh,” he says. He looks down at the floor. “Not sure, huh? Well, he’s real good. He’ll help you out a lot.”

  Even though this kid is goose-shit crazy, he still has more of an idea about his future than I do. Holy shit, who’s the misfit in this waiting-room relationship? Is he looking down on me? His endorsement doesn’t assure me any more than an infant vouching for an accountant, but I nod in agreement anyway.

  A door to one of the offices opens and Mr. Jenko, a heavyset balding man, appears. He surveys the waiting room. He looks at Tina and smiles as the now-purple-lipped girl continues to enjoy her lollipop in a lewd fashion.

  “Kevin,” he says.

  I follow him into his office, but all of a sudden I’m a little skeptical of Mr. Jenko’s competency. He can’t be the right fit for me if he’s working with that weirdo. Should I ask for a transfer of my case? Or should I walk out and leave right now? I give him the benefit of the doubt and continue with this visit, but I tell myself to get up and walk out if something feels off. His office walls are adorned with weathered, dingy college pennants and posters. Most of them look like they’re from the seventies. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure some of these schools exist. The room smells old, and also has a strong scent, which I detect is a mixture of coffee and Fritos.

  “How are you doing today?” Skepticism doesn’t stop me from being my normal cordial self.

  “Fantastic now. You see Donna out there with that lollipop?” he says.

  Donna, that’s her name? I knew it began with a D. I nod to his question.

  “Bet she can suck a tennis ball through a garden hose with that mouth,” he continues.

  His abrupt lewdness throws me off momentarily. We sit down at the same time, and he says, “Did you bring your completed college applications?”

  I don’t respond.

  “Still?” he says.

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t pick the right schools to apply to,” I say.

  “‘Right schools’? There are no right schools. For you, the right one is the one that accepts you,” he says.

  “I’m not sure what I want to do. It’s way too hard for me.”

  “You know it’s already extremely late in the selection process, and you might not even make it in under late submission, as most schools are already filled to their capacity for this fall?”

  “I’m sure they would make room for someone with my qualifications,” I say. He gives me a somewhat puzzled look. “I have to find out what I want to do with my life first, though.”

  “That’s adulthood. Glad you could make it. You can now vote. Maybe even go to war and die.” His tone rises. “Or go to war and not die and have your arms blown off.” Mr. Jenko throws up his arms in the air and puts them behinds his back as if they’ve been amputated. “Think how hard it is for you to masturbate with metal arms.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “And you’d definitely be masturbating a lot, because, since you have metal arms, your wife leaves you for your taller younger brother, who’s not nearly as smart as you but a lot more masculine than you. Who cares if he hunts and has all of his hair? I think hunting is inhumane, and you assured me my balding makes me look more refined and distinguished. You fell in love with me because I’m an academic. He sells aboveground Jacuzzis,” he says.

  “Huh? I don’t have a brother, sir,” I say.

  He snaps out of his story. In a monotone voice, he half inspiringly says, “Follow your passion.”

  “Passion?”

  He looks up from the crossword puzzle he’s begun since we started talking, and says, “Don’t tell me you don’t have a passion. Everyone has a passion. What’s your passion?”

  I look at him as if it’s the first time anyone has ever posed me that question. In fact, it is the first time anyone has asked me that question. I don’t have a response for him.

  “You’ve dreamed of being something or someone, right?” he asks.

  “Someone? I’m me.”

  “That’s not good enough. Don’t you want to be more than just you?”

  “No, me is fine.”

  He gets up. I think he’s getting tired of my alternating blank looks and shrug responses to his line of questioning. While walking over to his bookcase, he says, “When I was your age, I would sit back and daydream of being a writer. Seeing the world. Going on adventures. Living by my wits, with only a pen and my imagination. Then, eventually, writing the great American novel.” His face begins to lose the perpetual despair it sports and starts to glow. He reaches for a book from his case. “Fan of Mark Twain?”

  “Who?” I say.

  He slides the book back into its position. “That explains your situation with your grades,” he says under his breath.

  “Oh, I remember. I’m not familiar with the names of all of the explorers. Only the important ones.”

  “No child left behind my ass,” he says as he shakes his head. “Well, the point is, I wanted to be a writer. Now, look at me.” The gleam leaves his eye as he looks around at his beaten-down office.

  “But you help people, and that’s a great job,” I say.

  He sits down and rustles in his seat. “Help people? Yesterday, I spent three hours with some dipshit trying to find a school for ninjas. There’s no such thing, but I have to humor that asshole. That’s wasting my time. Not help. I could spend more time following my dreams. But I can’t. And then what happens? Who comes to help me? Who?”

  “You can always talk to me.” A part of me thought that was the lifeline he was looking for. An exchange of guidance between two equals.

  “What do you know?” he says.

  It was not what he was looking for.

  He exhales and says, “Back to you. What do you think you can do?”

  “My dad says I should go and become an investment banker.”

  He sighs. “Let’s think about what you do well. You’re really bad at math. Horrible even. Do you know what an investment banker does?”

  “He does many things . . . like . . .”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  I didn’t come here to get embarrassed and have him put my minor flaws on display. As I’m about to leave, an idea comes to me. Might be from a daydream, but I’ve never thought it’d come true. “Okay, I’d like to do something fulfilling.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Fulfilling, let’s build on that.”

  “All right . . . here it is . . . I think I could be a musician and express myself through song. Maybe the guitar. Saxophone. Drums. Oboe. I don’t know what that is exactly, but I’ve always liked the name.”

  He looks at me as if I’ve jumped on his desk, copped a squat, and shitted on his crossword puzzle. “One huge problem: you don’t play any instruments.”

  “Wouldn’t college be the ideal place to start, to nourish my hunger to learn?”

  “An achievable goal. I can’t be a gymnast, for example,” he says as he grabs his potbelly. “Look at your current skill set and what you’re good at. Then parlay that.” He looks right into my response-less face. Then, he looks at his watch. “Never mind. You’re best off following your dad’s advice and picking a job that’ll make you the most money, like an investment banker.”

  Really? “But you said I’m horrible in math.”

  “Go for it. What do I know?” he says.

  “And money isn’t everything,” I say.

  “Whoever said that doesn’t have it. I’m sitting here in this shitty job and have bills out the ass, son. I’m wearing corduroy in June because I can’t afford new pants. If I had money, I’d probably have my hair. Or an undetectable hair substitute at the very least.” He holds his wallet over his desk. It opens and only various business
and free-lunch punch cards fall out. “See, nothing in there.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Practically all of the students drive better cars than me. You know how it feels to know a fifteen-year-old is out there getting his foreplay practice run and dry humping cheerleaders in a car that’s more expensive and flashier than a grown, hardworking adult’s?”

  “No, sir.”

  Mr. Jenko rummages through the piles on his desk. “I knew this would happen. That you’d let me down and show up empty-handed. I set these aside for you.”

  He slides me four applications.

  “Fill these out and bring them back tomorrow. And I mean tomorrow,” he says.

  “Okay . . . okay.”

  “You can definitely get into these schools, they accept just about any—”

  My face scrunches up.

  He quickly backtracks. “I mean, you can get into these schools. They’ll look past your C-minus GPA, below-average SAT scores, and zero extracurricular activities.”

  “Grades aren’t everything. Schools look at the big picture,” I say.

  “Your big picture is drawn in crayon.”

  “But that still doesn’t clear up what I do when I get accepted,” I say. Mr. Jenko looks down at his papers, breaking eye contact with me. “If I get accepted?”

  “What do you mean, kid? Like a set of young supple titties. Feel it out. Life is about feeling it out. Go to class. Or don’t go to class. It’s college. Do what you want. Get drunk. Experiment with some drugs. Fuck some skanks. Speaking of, you see Donna’s camel toe? It looks like a moose foot in them biker shorts. Yummy, yummy, yummy,” he says as he licks his lips.

  At this point I’m completely desensitized to his inappropriate comments. “Excuse me, sir, but can we get back to me?”

  He leans in like he’s telling me a big secret. “You’re not that smart. You’re average. Not a genius by any stretch of the imagination. Not clinically retarded but slow. Still functional, you can easily get through life by fading into the background and being just good enough. No one will notice you and that’s a good thing. Focus on that. Be you. And you are average.”

  “Err, thanks,” I say as I get up from my seat. I don’t know if he was complimenting me on my street smarts or slamming my book smarts.

  “Remember, it’s okay to be okay. Put that on a pin or something and wear it proud.”

  I reach for the door.

  “One more thing . . .” he says. I turn around, hoping to get one nugget of real help that I can use and make this meeting worth the time. “Can you send Donna in next, not the dumb-fuck ninja kid? I need some dirty thoughts to work out of my mind.”

  “Sure.”

  I leave with more questions than I originally walked in with.

  Chapter Two

  Fifteen years later, a man in his late twenties stands in the kitchen of his apartment as his pregnant wife, still in her bathrobe and matching powder-blue fuzzy slippers, gazes. Clean-cut and wearing a navy pinstriped suit with a crisp blue shirt, he pensively paces through the apartment, only stopping for his wife to straighten his cornflower necktie.

  “Slow down, honey,” she says. He keeps frantically moving back and forth across the living room, putting papers and folders into his briefcase. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worrying.”

  She puts her hand on his shoulder to get him to stand still for one moment. “You’re going to do a great job,” she says. “You always nail these presentations.”

  He smiles. “I know I do, but everything is different now,” he says as he places his hand on her stomach.

  “Everything will be okay.” She hands him his overcoat and puts his scarf around his neck. He moves toward the door.

  “Forget something?” she says. He doubles back and leans in for his routine goodbye kiss.

  His wife gushes from the kiss. The pregnancy has her hormones teetering on the brink of salaciously tearing his clothes off one moment and hysterically crying about an opened jar of peanut butter the next. “I liked that, but I meant this.” She holds up his briefcase. “No nerves, huh?”

  “Well, maybe a little.” They both laugh. The piercing ring of the telephone brings their intimate moment to a halt.

  “I’ll get it. You need to go,” she says, as she shoos him out the door while picking up the phone. He doesn’t budge.

  “Hello,” she says into the phone. “Are you kidding me? This is the third time in two weeks.”

  He rescues her and holds out his hand for the phone. She passes it to him. “You have to stop doing this,” he says into the phone. “He’s a grown man. We’re not his personal wake-up service.”

  He walks over to the window and looks down at the parking lot that looks like it’s been covered with a freshly washed fluffy white comforter. “His car’s out there. . . . Okay, but this is the last time, and I mean it.

  “This is bullshit,” he says to his wife.

  “You’re going to be late, honey,” she tells him.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll only take me a few minutes,” he assures his wife. “I do this so often now. I’m starting to get a routine going.”

  The man walks out of his apartment, across the hallway of their garden-style apartment building, holding his cordless house phone. The walkway in between the two apartments has a light dusting of snow on the ground. He proceeds to knock on the door across from him. No one answers.

  Inside the apartment sits thirty-two-year-old me. I hope you didn’t think I was the man knocking. First of all, I would never involve myself in someone’s personal matters like Cliff does at every opportunity. Don’t knock on my door, unless you have gifts or something funny to say. Those things make my day better. You knocking early in the morning for anything else, I guarantee, makes it a whole lot worse. Secondly, I’m not going to attack his lifestyle choice or anything, but I’ve never fit that Everybody Loves Raymond sit-com lead role. The pregnant wife who considers it her job to professionally nag me, the henpecked husband, to fucking death, and the borderline alcoholism that it drives me to. I’ve never actually seen Cliff drink, even at their New Year’s Eve party I crashed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps a little flask of brandy in his desk drawer and takes a nip right before he has to come home. He most likely spends all day at the perfect job that he’s good at, where everyone loves him, laughs at all of his corny jokes, expects the world from him, and he consistently delivers on those expectations. That’s not my job. Truthfully, I don’t know exactly what he does for a living. And that’s not from a lack of him telling me either; I just didn’t care enough to pay attention or remember. My don’t-care-enough-to-pay-attention nature accompanied with my leeriness of people who seem too perfect forces me to keep my distance from the two of them. The way he and Janet look at me is not in an outright judgmental fashion, but it’s as if they’re both silently recording all of my inadequacies so they can discuss them over dinner conversation in large groups or among themselves. It’s people like that who always have the biggest cracks in their own personalities and lives. I’m upfront. All of my flaws are visible for all to see.

  The closed shades give my living room a cheerless feeling, which mirrors how I feel every morning during the work week. The climate is cool because I keep the heat on very low. Don’t want to give up all of my pennies to NJ Electric. POWs are happier than I am to wake up every day. This bowl of Fruity Pebbles might as well be my last meal before I’m relegated to a waterboarding session. An episode of SportsCenter is the last moment of enjoyment before my day begins and, for all intents and purposes, ends simultaneously. And all of that is being ruined by this fuckhead knocking at my door. His pounding gets louder; I turn the volume up on the TV. He doesn’t get the hint. Being perfect must mean there’s a certain density in your skull that’s impervious to the idea that someone doesn’t want to be bothered with you.

  “I know you’re in there. The TV’s pretty loud, as always. You’re watching sports highlights. Just
open the door.”

  I give in and come to terms with the fact he’s not going away. He’s so committed to disturbing me; no wonder he’s great at everything he does. Probably approaches every single task in his life with this same zeal. As I walk toward the door, the sports anchor gives an update on a professional basketball coach who got fired with three years left on his contract that guaranteed him $15 million. So he’ll get paid the same $5 million each year for the next three years for sitting at home on his ass. I can do that; I’m overqualified as an ass-sitter. That’s more money than I’ll ever make in my life, and he got canned. Lucky son of a bitch. Then, I swear, the anchor says, “Kevin, don’t you wish that shit would happen to you? Nope, you’re a sorry bitch. Go to work, punk-ass.” I double back to the TV, but it must be the sugar rush from the salad bowl of cereal I’m eating that has me going delirious.

  The banging continues as I open the door and, as expected, an exasperated Cliff is standing there. He doesn’t even comment that I’m wearing a collared shirt under my robe and no pants, only my boxers. I wonder if I showed up with a visible boner if he’d ever knock on my door again. Something to think about for the future interruptions. I thought there was a chance he might’ve been here to reprimand me again for the noise I made this morning listening to my music as I took my shower, but I see the phone in his hand. I know exactly why he’s here even before he thrusts the phone into my chest.

  “Thanks, how’s Lynn doing? Is the baby okay? Sorry, I can’t babysit. I have to go to work,” I say.

  “Cut the shit. You know she still hasn’t delivered.”

  “Why would I know that? Hey, I told you if the baby’s skin tone comes out black or looking the slightest bit beige don’t come looking for me,” I say as I laugh it off. He doesn’t laugh. He never laughs. Such a joyless man. I keep catching him glancing at his watch, so I know he’s in a rush to get to work; even if he wasn’t he’d want to get there early to organize his desk or some bullshit like that. Knowing this, I make my personal quest for this morning to keep him here as long as possible.