Lantana and Nemo emerged from Laredo middle school into the albumen Colorado morning. Ice coated the sidewalks and parking lot, and the sun did its best to melt it all, locked in battle with the wind chill. A few students took their recess on the basketball courts, dribbling bodies, unimpressive layups. One boy, a tall Caucasoid by the name of Jeffrey Westcott, stole around his defender to sink a sideline shot. He looked up at Nemo and, with his lowboned Midwestern jaw, smiled.
“Where are we going, dad?” asked Nemo, a little flush as he tried to look away from Jeffrey, checking the ball with a stouter boy named Byron, or Burton, he couldn’t remember, who saw him and hollered out, “There goes the masturbation king!”
Holding the ball high above his head, a couple of the boys joined him in flouting, juddering their hands as if they were filled with imaginary ketchup bottles. “Masturbation King. Masturbation King.” One sunk to his knees in tribute, fanning his arms above his head. “Oh, Masturbation King, teach us your ways!”
“See,” said Lantana, clopping his son on the back. “They fucking worship you. Goddamn. And that nurse thinks you need therapy? What a load of crap.”
Jeffrey Westcott, standing with the ball in his hand and a pair of long Kappa leggings, lowered his head at the chanting and walked away. As he did so, Nemo watched the back of his shoes, the way his low-cut Reeboks revealed the bottom of his socks. He had such tall femurs, and what seemed to be a personality much like them. Though he didn’t really talk to Nemo, and though he was what was considered to be a popular boy, he was kind whenever they crossed. Sometimes Nemo thought he was being studying by him, as if he’d become a new species of basketball. Though slightly creepy, it was better than being mocked. Anything was better than the ketchup bottles.
“Let’s just go home, dad,” said Nemo, pulling at his father’s pocket. The kids returned to playing ball.
“Home?” asked Lantana, as if Nemo had said hooker. “We aren’t going home at all. Today you will learn what I once had to learn.”
“Oh?” asked Nemo. He was hiding behind his father, but not sure why.
Lantana smiled.
“Something to keep you out of the nurse’s office.”
Nemo was terrified when Lantana steered away from their golden Saturn, encrusted in mud, and led him across the parking lot and up the street to Smoky Hill Road where the High School was. It, like the road, went by the same name, and was a host for the thousands of infectious microbes some people referred to generously as teenagers. The pioneers of Smoky Hill had set up the school on what could be considered a fault line of wealth and poverty. The community itself was the result of a fiscal earthquake, a perfect mix of hoodlums and Baccalaureate conservatives and gun toting members of the Aurora gang, Asian Pride, who had, apart from hand-held Uzis, scores of Hondas that looked an awful lot like time machines. Even for Lantana and his superior strength, venturing onto the High School’s turf of perpetually dying grass was dangerous, and Nemo trailed him at the lip of his spandex, praying to a God he didn’t know.
As they passed around the western side of the school, they found a patch of fourteen-or-so-year old girls chattering with cigarettes on a hill. For the most part, they seemed just as young as Nemo, even younger, but they didn’t have the inhibitions of his classmates. Already their bodies gave off maturity in drafts, once-child’s limbs confused by adolescence. Nemo was terrified just looking at them. This entirely new species of female.
Lantana, halting about twenty feet away, bent down to him on one knee and said, “In ancient Japan, there existed a country of feudal lords, or Shoguns, and their serfs, much like the dark ages of Europe. This period was called Sengoku Jidai, and was a time of great war.”
Nemo looked up at his father.
“What?”
Lantana shook his head. “Just listen! Three emperors,” he put up as many fingers and checked to see if they were being watched, “great men, were responsible for the unification of Japan. Their names were Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.”
“Eye-ee-ya-sue?”
Lantana nodded. “These three unifiers represented three unique qualities that made Japan’s modern evolution so successful. Nobunaga was the sword, Hideyoshi, the unifier, and Ieyasu, posthumously, was referred to as the Light of the East, due to the establishment of his Shogunate.”
“I think we should get out of here,” said Nemo, looking over at the pack of young girls. They snickered at some clandestine affair. There was one in particular who could have been a boy with short-cropped black hair and a squarish face. She had black converses with rubbed-down stars. A Virginia Slim spined between her fingers.
“Ieyasu created an empire that would rule Japan peacefully for two hundred and fifty years until the West forced its borders open,” Lantana continued. “But he couldn’t have done it without his predecessors, their violence and treachery, their ability to make… unsavory decisions.”
“Dad,” said Nemo. “I’m really okay. If you don’t want me to go to the nurse’s office anymore, or therapy, I won’t. I promise.”
“We’ll do more than that, son. See, over there, within that gaggle of post-pubescent females, is your key out of social doom.”
“Oh?” asked Nemo, despite his scrutiny, a little interested. Middle school had soured most of his options. Instead of shrinking, he grew a little bolder. If there was one thing he could do well, it was being forced to listen.
“All you need to do,” said Lantana. “Is practice the three tenants of the generals, and, voila! Years of undisturbed peace.”
“I don’t understand,” said Nemo, almost resolved to giving up. “What do you want me to do?”
“First, choose the one you like the most.”
“Like?”
“Yes. Like.”
“But why?”
“Just choose and I’ll tell you.”
Nemo looked over the crowd. Smoke from cigarettes cambered over fingernails, ponytails and strawberry blond curls—there was a black girl with straightened locks, shiny silver lips and an iris in her hair. As he watched the crowd, afraid they’d notice him as he attempted to choose, he found that he didn’t really ‘like’ any of them. Instead they made him shudder, as if he’d like to know them, but not kiss them, as if he’d like to understand them, but not walk hand in hand with them. Then, with unexplainable bigness, he imagined the face of Jeffrey Westcott and his sultry kindle of yellow hair. When he did he felt his heart pulse at his wrist, as well as a little like vomiting.
“Her,” Nemo said, pointing at the girl with the crew cut. “I, I want her.”
“Good,” said Lantana, focusing his one eye. “Wait, who?”
“That one,” said Nemo, tipping his head. “With the short hair.”
“Huh,” stated the bald man, stroking his chin. “Well, I can’t argue with individual taste. You don’t think she’s a little, I don’t know…hideous?”
Nemo looked at his father and shrugged.
“No matter,” said Lantana, shaking his head. “Now that you’ve decided on the female of your choice, you must stop thinking of her as a person, and instead treat her as a goal. An accomplishment. A landmass, like Japan. Consider yourself an embodiment of the three wise emperors.”
“I need think of her like a country?” Nemo asked.
“Exactly. A country you need to conquer. Thus, like Nobunaga, you must be quick with the fist. Like Hideyoshi, smooth with coercion. And in faith to Ieyasu, allow her heart to shatter in your honor. Attack, coerce, wait for the payoff. So is the passage to manhood.”
Nemo closed his eyes. “Attack, coerce, wait for the payoff.”
“Now you’ve got it.”
“Attack, coerce, wait for the payoff.”
“Let’s say it together—“
“Attack, coerce, wait for the payoff.”
“Now go,” said Lantana, urging his back with his palm. “Make that female yours. Manu!”
Nemo, ignoring all the nagging voices that told him to turn back, marched into the thicket of freshman girls, fists at his sides. Behind him his father watched with an excited eye. Thinking of Jeffrey Westcott, he came before the girl with cropped hair, a shovel of a chin, who looked at him and said, “Yea?” Smoke in his eyes. Nemo peered up below the brim of his cap, wound up his fist and punched her in the face.
“Be my girlfriend,” he said.
The other girls screamed.
“Oh shit,” said Lantana. “That’s not what I meant!”
*****
For more League of Somebodies, including where to get your own copy, visit samuelsattin.net
*****
[All images courtesy Samuel Sattin and Dark Coast Press]
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