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Rats saw God
Though I tried to clear my head of the effects of the fat, resiny doobie I’d polished off an hour before, things were still fuzzy as I stumbled into senior counselor Jeff DeMouy’s office. I had learned the hard way that Mrs. Schmidt, my physics teacher, was less naive than her Laura Ashley wardrobe suggested. I made the mistake of arriving in her class sporting quartersized pupils and a British Sterling–drenched blue jean jacket. In a random sweep of her classroom, she paused at my desk, sniffed, ordered me to remove my sunglasses, then filled out the forms necessary to land me here.
Wakefield High’s powers that be, having exhausted all other options in their losing war against us stoners (including locker-by-locker searches, drug-sniffing dogs, and Untouchables-style police raids), were now playing hardball. By order of the principal, I was shuffled off to DeMouy, a UC Berkeley product reputed to be an earth goddess–worshipping, bee pollen–eating, swimming-with-the-dolphins New Age flake. I braced for descent into a touchy-feely hell presided over by a lisping sage who would suggest I give myself a big hug. “Go ahead,” I could already hear him saying. “You deserve your share of happiness.”
To DeMouy’s credit, his office contained no posters of grumpy bulldogs or gorillas with “I hate Mondays” slogans on them. In this respect he had already exceeded the expectations I had for most educators. His office had more of a comfy, oolong-scented seventies feel: lots of plants and a humidifier purring away on top of a file cabinet. One of those environmental sound-effects recordings was evidently being played; I could make out the sounds of waves breaking on the beach, and we were a good three miles from the ocean. All in all, a grand spot to ride out the rest of my high. Through my pleasant dizziness and a potted cactus on his desk, I could see only the back of a manila folder labeled YORK, STEVEN R.
“Tea, Mr. York?” DeMouy asked as he lowered the folder. “It might help you come down a bit.”
DeMouy looked nothing like I had imagined from the reports I had received from my brethren. This was our new hippie counselor? Surfer confidant? The man before me wore a woolly, regimental-striped tie with a teed-up golf ball monogram.
“No,” I said, trying to look impatient. “Just put me in detention. I’ll try to get in touch with my feelings there.”
“Humor me for a few minutes.”
“Okeydokey,” I said, slouching a bit further down in my chair and staring unmistakably at the clock above him. DeMouy sipped an obscure Asian blend from a Far Side mug and read from my folder.
“You don’t much care for school, do you?”
I deadpanned concern. “Is it obvious?”
“Well, let’s see here,” he said, thumbing through my portfolio. “In less than a semester you’ve tallied one in possession and three under the influences. This is doubly impressive when one considers the nine days of class you’ve missed... ostensibly for health reasons.”
He paused to see if I had a reaction. I didn’t.
“And then there are the comments on your report card: ‘lacks motivation,’ ‘doesn’t turn in homework,’ ‘falls asleep in class.’”
“Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We’re at the end of World War Two in history, and I can’t wait to find out who wins.”
DeMouy shook his head. “You’re not in my office because you’re high, Steve. For that they just keep sticking you in detention until you see the error of your ways. What I’m interested in is how this is possible.”
He threw an envelope across his desk. I eyed it cautiously.
“Read it.”
The letter was addressed generically to Guidance Counselor, Wakefield High School; the return address said National Testing Service. It was a press release identifying two of Wakefield’s finest as National Merit finalists, some Allison Kimble as well as one presently detained pothead.
“Those results could be your ticket into an Ivy League school, but the C’s you’re making in the classes you still bother to show up for around here aren’t helping your case any,” DeMouy said.
“Four years without any activities might not have them scrambling for their acceptance forms either,” I suggested, though I was busy picturing myself with a sweater tied around my neck, sailing with Kennedys, desecrating human remains in some arcane Skull and Bones initiation rite.
“What happened in Texas?”
“What do you mean?” I stalled, startled by the new direction of his questioning.
“When this came in I was so sure they had the wrong Steve York that I did some checking into your records. According to your transcripts, you had a 4.0 through your first five semesters of high school. Near-perfect attendance. Then, the last semester of your junior year, it just falls apart. You even failed English III. Do you mind telling me how someone who makes a 760 verbal on his SAT fails English?”
“I couldn’t make it all the way through The Outsiders again,” I said. Suddenly I wasn’t very comfortable in DeMouy’s office.
DeMouy continued digging through my folder. “Your father is Alan York the astronaut.”
“Is that a question?”
“Was he the third or fourth man to walk on the moon?” he said. “That is a question.”
“I’ll have to go home and check the trophy case. Though if you hear him tell the story, you’d swear he was first. This third or fourth thing may come as a big disappointment to him.”
“You sound like you resent him.”
“I don’t anything him.”
“Do you still think of Texas as home?” DeMouy asked.
“No.”
I had moved to San Diego from Houston at the beginning of the summer. The astronaut had fought desperately for custody of me at the divorce hearing four years before. Sarah, my younger sister, was free to move with Mom to California, but the old man thought my future too important to trust to any non-hero. I was his heir. As such, I would be disciplined. I would study hard, excel in sports, choose my friends carefully, choose my college even more carefully. In short, bring glory to the York name.
I relocated to California after taking the last final exam of my junior year. I didn’t go home or ask permission. I walked out of class, got in my El Camino, and drove twenty-seven hours nonstop until I reached the Pacific Ocean. The astronaut didn’t even put up much of a fight when Mom called and told him I planned on staying. I imagine he had already seen his best laid plans turn to shit. My move allowed him the consolation of getting to share the blame.
“Where is home?”
I couldn’t help it. I saw Dub’s bedroom: the floor covered with jeans, T-shirts, and bras; the corkboard south wall supporting hundreds of tacked-on photographs, poems, and matchbooks from every club and roadside attraction Dub visited; her milk-crate-and-plywood desk supporting her prized PC; and most importantly, the door leading to her backyard. Always accessible, day or night—home.
“Wherever I lay my hat,” I answered.
DeMouy glanced up from my file, but he kept his composure. I was certain the teen-hating, self-important, petty bureaucrat trapped inside the bodies of all educational administrators would soon appear. He scribbled something on a yellow legal pad.
“Do you realize you will be one English credit short at the end of the semester?” DeMouy asked.
“Yeah,” I said casually, though I had been dreading that particular hurdle since transferring.
“Maybe we could work something out that would allow you to graduate on time,” DeMouy said.
“Such as... ?”
I assumed he would want me to sign some sort of contract, something on official-looking stationery promising I wouldn’t show up to school stoned. I’d sign it. I’d sign a contract promising not to breathe until graduation if it meant getting out of summer school.
“I want you to write a paper.”
“How long does it have to be?”
“One hundred pages—”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s one hundred typewritten pages. You do have a choice. Summer school would probably be easier.”
“You don’t want a paper; you want a novel.”
“You get to choose the topic,” DeMouy continued. “It can be fiction or nonfiction, an action adventure, a tale of teen angst and neglected cries for help. Though I would suggest you choose a topic you know something about.”
“Who’s going to grade this? If it’s Mrs. Croslin, it can be a grocery list as long as I punctuate it correctly.”
“You’ll turn pages in to me, five to ten at a time,” DeMouy said.
“Are you sure you’re qualified? I mean, did all those years spent probing the teen mind leave any room for a true appreciation of literature?”
“I can manage. My first six years out of college I taught English. Now, I’ve never worked with a prodigy before, so you’ll excuse me if I occasionally fail to grasp some of your especially esoteric passages.”
Mrs. Martin, the school’s human pumpkin of an attendance secretary, marched in without knocking. I could hear her panty hose–encased thighs rub together as she moved past me to hand a note to DeMouy. Through the open door I could see Sarah. Now if the principal were at all fearful of me, the bad seed, he should have been doubly so of Sarah. Ranked number one in her class and the first junior to be elected student council president, my sister wasn’t satisfied with the ritual duties and perks her office bestowed upon her. Under her leadership, the student council no longer hung spirit posters or sold M&M’s to pay for homecoming decorations. Earlier in the year she organized a walkout to call attention to the asbestos-laden dust being stirred up by the contractors who were charged with removing the offending tiles. Sixty percent of the student body didn’t return after lunch. CNN even did a forty-five-second piece on it that included a fifteen-second soundbite from Sarah. That particular episode resulted in a call from the astronaut warning her that prestigious colleges didn’t accept radicals. I think he was embarrassed because they identified her as his daughter.
Sarah spotted me in DeMouy’s office and rolled her eyes. She rubbed one extended index finger across the other. Everything the astronaut wanted in his son had been inherited by his daughter, but the old man was too dumb to notice it. If another York were destined to walk on the moon, it was Sarah, not me.
“You’ll be the only one who’ll read it?” I asked DeMouy. My quick return to the subject at hand, I realized, was a potentially ruinous deviation from thrust-and-parry protocol involved in negotiations with adults.
“Promise,” he assured.
“I’ll think about it,” I said coolly, picking myself up out of the chair and heading for the door.
“Steve.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Don’t think about it for too long. It’s a limited time offer.”
· · ·
No one was around when I arrived home after school. This was the norm. Sis was out harassing school board members... something about vegetarian lunches in the cafeteria. Mother could have been anywhere in the hemisphere. Her marriage three years ago to a pilot for Delta had been a nonstop honeymoon. The fact that she married a commercial pilot impressed me as Mom’s ultimate slap in the astronaut’s face. I mean, talk about a giant leap down the scale of aeronautic nobility just to make a point. But month after month of weekend trips to Aspen or Acapulco had convinced Sarah and me there was more to her choosing this new husband, this “Chuck,” than simply the revenge factor. I was lucky. I had only been constant witness to the past five months of the union. Sarah said during the first year she couldn’t go anywhere with them—let alone have friends over—for fear the two would play tongue hockey in front of everyone.
I have always been, with the exception of students who failed a grade, the oldest in my class by at least a month. That may help explain, in part, why I’m so anxious to get out of high school. I’m nearly two years older than Sarah, though she’s only one grade behind me. See, the astronaut thought I needed to be held back so that I would be more competitive in sports. Had I any interest in sports, I might be grateful; but as it stands, it will take me an extra year to get on with my life. Besides, I’ve hardly “filled out,” as adults say of teen girls who get their breasts and boys whose arms, legs, and torso gain definition and sprout hair. Au contraire... sleek, lean, rangy all describe this physique, that is if you’re kind. Skinny, bony, scrawny, gawky will work if you’re not. Other than my pronounced lack of heft, I’m pretty nondescript: five-eleven, longish wavy brown hair, acne declining, wispy traces of headbanger mustache long since shaved off.
I’m “gifted.” I know this because I was tested in junior high. Twelve of us so designated were isolated in separate classes, taught Latin phrases, allowed to use expensive telescopes, taken on field trips to ballets, and labeled complete geeks by our classmates. I’m sure the mental picture I’m creating is quite flattering: “Property of the Borg” T-shirt, overstuffed book bag. Am I close? I admit I’ve never been the dream date of anyone’s homeroom, but it’s not like I was the leading object of ridicule.
My ears are pierced, both of them. This in itself can be offered as explanation for the astronaut’s failure to put up a fight when I moved west. The first earring was a bit trendy, I admit, but in constantly looking for ways to exist outside the mainstream, I was quick to take Dub up on her offer to complete the set, which she did one night with a leather stitching needle, two ice cubes, a potato, and bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There are those males who merely fill ear holes with tiny stones hardly big enough to offend a marine. Not me. Most days I wear big hoops. When I combine the look with a doo rag, I’m a regular pirate.
I grabbed a sleeve of Lorna Doones from the pantry and made my way upstairs to my room. Switching on the Macintosh I had received for my thirteenth birthday in lieu of the CD player I had requested, I sat down at my desk. Ninety minutes later I was staring at the fireworks screen saver that kicks in after five minutes of inactivity.
My one explosion of insanely brilliant creativity came in the form of a title for a story about a young bohemian relishing his first taste of life on the highway.
ROADS SCHOLAR
A novel by Steve York
After that, little came to me. I tried to imagine my first night driving off into nowhere. Who would I meet? What would they look like? More important, what rudely formed yet priceless gems of wisdom would pass from these people of the earth to the wing-footed young traveler? I struggled with several opening sentences. I immediately deleted, with one exception, each attempt. Though it pains me to do this, I’ll offer one passage describing the “feel of the highway” that I saved for the comic-first-efforts preface to the posthumously issued Collected Works of Steve York.
He had been down roads to nowhere and alleys of sin. He had taken the high road and seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but only one stretch of pavement beckoned without respite—the one leading away from home.
Another thirty minutes passed.
Needing inspiration, I opened the dictionary, determined to begin my story with whatever word my finger landed on. I flipped to the middle and stabbed a page.
Oviparous: adj. Producing eggs that hatch outside the body.
Definitely time t...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
Though I tried to clear my head of the effects of the fat, resiny doobie I’d polished off an hour before, things were still fuzzy as I stumbled into senior counselor Jeff DeMouy’s office. I had learned the hard way that Mrs. Schmidt, my physics teacher, was less naive than her Laura Ashley wardrobe suggested. I made the mistake of arriving in her class sporting quartersized pupils and a British Sterling–drenched blue jean jacket. In a random sweep of her classroom, she paused at my desk, sniffed, ordered me to remove my sunglasses, then filled out the forms necessary to land me here.
Wakefield High’s powers that be, having exhausted all other options in their losing war against us stoners (including locker-by-locker searches, drug-sniffing dogs, and Untouchables-style police raids), were now playing hardball. By order of the principal, I was shuffled off to DeMouy, a UC Berkeley product reputed to be an earth goddess–worshipping, bee pollen–eating, swimming-with-the-dolphins New Age flake. I braced for descent into a touchy-feely hell presided over by a lisping sage who would suggest I give myself a big hug. “Go ahead,” I could already hear him saying. “You deserve your share of happiness.”
To DeMouy’s credit, his office contained no posters of grumpy bulldogs or gorillas with “I hate Mondays” slogans on them. In this respect he had already exceeded the expectations I had for most educators. His office had more of a comfy, oolong-scented seventies feel: lots of plants and a humidifier purring away on top of a file cabinet. One of those environmental sound-effects recordings was evidently being played; I could make out the sounds of waves breaking on the beach, and we were a good three miles from the ocean. All in all, a grand spot to ride out the rest of my high. Through my pleasant dizziness and a potted cactus on his desk, I could see only the back of a manila folder labeled YORK, STEVEN R.
“Tea, Mr. York?” DeMouy asked as he lowered the folder. “It might help you come down a bit.”
DeMouy looked nothing like I had imagined from the reports I had received from my brethren. This was our new hippie counselor? Surfer confidant? The man before me wore a woolly, regimental-striped tie with a teed-up golf ball monogram.
“No,” I said, trying to look impatient. “Just put me in detention. I’ll try to get in touch with my feelings there.”
“Humor me for a few minutes.”
“Okeydokey,” I said, slouching a bit further down in my chair and staring unmistakably at the clock above him. DeMouy sipped an obscure Asian blend from a Far Side mug and read from my folder.
“You don’t much care for school, do you?”
I deadpanned concern. “Is it obvious?”
“Well, let’s see here,” he said, thumbing through my portfolio. “In less than a semester you’ve tallied one in possession and three under the influences. This is doubly impressive when one considers the nine days of class you’ve missed... ostensibly for health reasons.”
He paused to see if I had a reaction. I didn’t.
“And then there are the comments on your report card: ‘lacks motivation,’ ‘doesn’t turn in homework,’ ‘falls asleep in class.’”
“Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We’re at the end of World War Two in history, and I can’t wait to find out who wins.”
DeMouy shook his head. “You’re not in my office because you’re high, Steve. For that they just keep sticking you in detention until you see the error of your ways. What I’m interested in is how this is possible.”
He threw an envelope across his desk. I eyed it cautiously.
“Read it.”
The letter was addressed generically to Guidance Counselor, Wakefield High School; the return address said National Testing Service. It was a press release identifying two of Wakefield’s finest as National Merit finalists, some Allison Kimble as well as one presently detained pothead.
“Those results could be your ticket into an Ivy League school, but the C’s you’re making in the classes you still bother to show up for around here aren’t helping your case any,” DeMouy said.
“Four years without any activities might not have them scrambling for their acceptance forms either,” I suggested, though I was busy picturing myself with a sweater tied around my neck, sailing with Kennedys, desecrating human remains in some arcane Skull and Bones initiation rite.
“What happened in Texas?”
“What do you mean?” I stalled, startled by the new direction of his questioning.
“When this came in I was so sure they had the wrong Steve York that I did some checking into your records. According to your transcripts, you had a 4.0 through your first five semesters of high school. Near-perfect attendance. Then, the last semester of your junior year, it just falls apart. You even failed English III. Do you mind telling me how someone who makes a 760 verbal on his SAT fails English?”
“I couldn’t make it all the way through The Outsiders again,” I said. Suddenly I wasn’t very comfortable in DeMouy’s office.
DeMouy continued digging through my folder. “Your father is Alan York the astronaut.”
“Is that a question?”
“Was he the third or fourth man to walk on the moon?” he said. “That is a question.”
“I’ll have to go home and check the trophy case. Though if you hear him tell the story, you’d swear he was first. This third or fourth thing may come as a big disappointment to him.”
“You sound like you resent him.”
“I don’t anything him.”
“Do you still think of Texas as home?” DeMouy asked.
“No.”
I had moved to San Diego from Houston at the beginning of the summer. The astronaut had fought desperately for custody of me at the divorce hearing four years before. Sarah, my younger sister, was free to move with Mom to California, but the old man thought my future too important to trust to any non-hero. I was his heir. As such, I would be disciplined. I would study hard, excel in sports, choose my friends carefully, choose my college even more carefully. In short, bring glory to the York name.
I relocated to California after taking the last final exam of my junior year. I didn’t go home or ask permission. I walked out of class, got in my El Camino, and drove twenty-seven hours nonstop until I reached the Pacific Ocean. The astronaut didn’t even put up much of a fight when Mom called and told him I planned on staying. I imagine he had already seen his best laid plans turn to shit. My move allowed him the consolation of getting to share the blame.
“Where is home?”
I couldn’t help it. I saw Dub’s bedroom: the floor covered with jeans, T-shirts, and bras; the corkboard south wall supporting hundreds of tacked-on photographs, poems, and matchbooks from every club and roadside attraction Dub visited; her milk-crate-and-plywood desk supporting her prized PC; and most importantly, the door leading to her backyard. Always accessible, day or night—home.
“Wherever I lay my hat,” I answered.
DeMouy glanced up from my file, but he kept his composure. I was certain the teen-hating, self-important, petty bureaucrat trapped inside the bodies of all educational administrators would soon appear. He scribbled something on a yellow legal pad.
“Do you realize you will be one English credit short at the end of the semester?” DeMouy asked.
“Yeah,” I said casually, though I had been dreading that particular hurdle since transferring.
“Maybe we could work something out that would allow you to graduate on time,” DeMouy said.
“Such as... ?”
I assumed he would want me to sign some sort of contract, something on official-looking stationery promising I wouldn’t show up to school stoned. I’d sign it. I’d sign a contract promising not to breathe until graduation if it meant getting out of summer school.
“I want you to write a paper.”
“How long does it have to be?”
“One hundred pages—”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s one hundred typewritten pages. You do have a choice. Summer school would probably be easier.”
“You don’t want a paper; you want a novel.”
“You get to choose the topic,” DeMouy continued. “It can be fiction or nonfiction, an action adventure, a tale of teen angst and neglected cries for help. Though I would suggest you choose a topic you know something about.”
“Who’s going to grade this? If it’s Mrs. Croslin, it can be a grocery list as long as I punctuate it correctly.”
“You’ll turn pages in to me, five to ten at a time,” DeMouy said.
“Are you sure you’re qualified? I mean, did all those years spent probing the teen mind leave any room for a true appreciation of literature?”
“I can manage. My first six years out of college I taught English. Now, I’ve never worked with a prodigy before, so you’ll excuse me if I occasionally fail to grasp some of your especially esoteric passages.”
Mrs. Martin, the school’s human pumpkin of an attendance secretary, marched in without knocking. I could hear her panty hose–encased thighs rub together as she moved past me to hand a note to DeMouy. Through the open door I could see Sarah. Now if the principal were at all fearful of me, the bad seed, he should have been doubly so of Sarah. Ranked number one in her class and the first junior to be elected student council president, my sister wasn’t satisfied with the ritual duties and perks her office bestowed upon her. Under her leadership, the student council no longer hung spirit posters or sold M&M’s to pay for homecoming decorations. Earlier in the year she organized a walkout to call attention to the asbestos-laden dust being stirred up by the contractors who were charged with removing the offending tiles. Sixty percent of the student body didn’t return after lunch. CNN even did a forty-five-second piece on it that included a fifteen-second soundbite from Sarah. That particular episode resulted in a call from the astronaut warning her that prestigious colleges didn’t accept radicals. I think he was embarrassed because they identified her as his daughter.
Sarah spotted me in DeMouy’s office and rolled her eyes. She rubbed one extended index finger across the other. Everything the astronaut wanted in his son had been inherited by his daughter, but the old man was too dumb to notice it. If another York were destined to walk on the moon, it was Sarah, not me.
“You’ll be the only one who’ll read it?” I asked DeMouy. My quick return to the subject at hand, I realized, was a potentially ruinous deviation from thrust-and-parry protocol involved in negotiations with adults.
“Promise,” he assured.
“I’ll think about it,” I said coolly, picking myself up out of the chair and heading for the door.
“Steve.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Don’t think about it for too long. It’s a limited time offer.”
· · ·
No one was around when I arrived home after school. This was the norm. Sis was out harassing school board members... something about vegetarian lunches in the cafeteria. Mother could have been anywhere in the hemisphere. Her marriage three years ago to a pilot for Delta had been a nonstop honeymoon. The fact that she married a commercial pilot impressed me as Mom’s ultimate slap in the astronaut’s face. I mean, talk about a giant leap down the scale of aeronautic nobility just to make a point. But month after month of weekend trips to Aspen or Acapulco had convinced Sarah and me there was more to her choosing this new husband, this “Chuck,” than simply the revenge factor. I was lucky. I had only been constant witness to the past five months of the union. Sarah said during the first year she couldn’t go anywhere with them—let alone have friends over—for fear the two would play tongue hockey in front of everyone.
I have always been, with the exception of students who failed a grade, the oldest in my class by at least a month. That may help explain, in part, why I’m so anxious to get out of high school. I’m nearly two years older than Sarah, though she’s only one grade behind me. See, the astronaut thought I needed to be held back so that I would be more competitive in sports. Had I any interest in sports, I might be grateful; but as it stands, it will take me an extra year to get on with my life. Besides, I’ve hardly “filled out,” as adults say of teen girls who get their breasts and boys whose arms, legs, and torso gain definition and sprout hair. Au contraire... sleek, lean, rangy all describe this physique, that is if you’re kind. Skinny, bony, scrawny, gawky will work if you’re not. Other than my pronounced lack of heft, I’m pretty nondescript: five-eleven, longish wavy brown hair, acne declining, wispy traces of headbanger mustache long since shaved off.
I’m “gifted.” I know this because I was tested in junior high. Twelve of us so designated were isolated in separate classes, taught Latin phrases, allowed to use expensive telescopes, taken on field trips to ballets, and labeled complete geeks by our classmates. I’m sure the mental picture I’m creating is quite flattering: “Property of the Borg” T-shirt, overstuffed book bag. Am I close? I admit I’ve never been the dream date of anyone’s homeroom, but it’s not like I was the leading object of ridicule.
My ears are pierced, both of them. This in itself can be offered as explanation for the astronaut’s failure to put up a fight when I moved west. The first earring was a bit trendy, I admit, but in constantly looking for ways to exist outside the mainstream, I was quick to take Dub up on her offer to complete the set, which she did one night with a leather stitching needle, two ice cubes, a potato, and bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There are those males who merely fill ear holes with tiny stones hardly big enough to offend a marine. Not me. Most days I wear big hoops. When I combine the look with a doo rag, I’m a regular pirate.
I grabbed a sleeve of Lorna Doones from the pantry and made my way upstairs to my room. Switching on the Macintosh I had received for my thirteenth birthday in lieu of the CD player I had requested, I sat down at my desk. Ninety minutes later I was staring at the fireworks screen saver that kicks in after five minutes of inactivity.
My one explosion of insanely brilliant creativity came in the form of a title for a story about a young bohemian relishing his first taste of life on the highway.
ROADS SCHOLAR
A novel by Steve York
After that, little came to me. I tried to imagine my first night driving off into nowhere. Who would I meet? What would they look like? More important, what rudely formed yet priceless gems of wisdom would pass from these people of the earth to the wing-footed young traveler? I struggled with several opening sentences. I immediately deleted, with one exception, each attempt. Though it pains me to do this, I’ll offer one passage describing the “feel of the highway” that I saved for the comic-first-efforts preface to the posthumously issued Collected Works of Steve York.
He had been down roads to nowhere and alleys of sin. He had taken the high road and seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but only one stretch of pavement beckoned without respite—the one leading away from home.
Another thirty minutes passed.
Needing inspiration, I opened the dictionary, determined to begin my story with whatever word my finger landed on. I flipped to the middle and stabbed a page.
Oviparous: adj. Producing eggs that hatch outside the body.
Definitely time t...
Steve details his descent from bright star to burnout in this newly repackaged edition of the definitive, highly acclaimed novel from the creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down.
Houston, sophomore year: Steve is on top of the world. He and his friends are the talk of the school. He’s in love with a terrific girl. He can even deal with “the astronaut”—a world-famous hero who happens to be his father.
San Diego, senior year: Steve is bummed out, drugged out, flunking out. A no-nonsense counselor says he can graduate if he writes a 100-page paper. So Steve starts writing, and as the paper becomes more and more personal, he reveals how a National Merit Scholar has become an under-achieving stoner. And in telling how he got to where he is, Steve discovers how to get to where he wants to be.
Houston, sophomore year: Steve is on top of the world. He and his friends are the talk of the school. He’s in love with a terrific girl. He can even deal with “the astronaut”—a world-famous hero who happens to be his father.
San Diego, senior year: Steve is bummed out, drugged out, flunking out. A no-nonsense counselor says he can graduate if he writes a 100-page paper. So Steve starts writing, and as the paper becomes more and more personal, he reveals how a National Merit Scholar has become an under-achieving stoner. And in telling how he got to where he is, Steve discovers how to get to where he wants to be.
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurDemco Media
- Date d'édition1996
- ISBN 10 0606097791
- ISBN 13 9780606097796
- ReliureBelle reliure
- Evaluation vendeur
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