Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium Read Online Free PDF Page B

years, in fact, because I’ll still be sixteen in twenty-two months’ time. So let’s say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid–a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I’d have to tell you a Stephen King-type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t help me right now.
     
    So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don’t, and not just because I haven’t got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It’s not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren’t going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don’t want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I’d have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I’m a typical product of our times, or what I tell you about being fifteen, or any of those other questions we have to discuss when we read a story in school. It’s not the point. All you need to know is where I got the video recorder from, and maybe, I suppose, why I got it, so I’ll tell you.
     
    I found it a couple blocks from my house, in this store that sells used electronic stuff. It cost fifty bucks, which seemed pretty good to me, although now it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, but that’s another story. Or rather, it’s this story, but a different part of it. And I bought it because…OK, so maybe I will have to give you a little background, but I won’t make it into a big drama. I’ll just give you the facts. My mom and I moved from L.A. to Berkeley about three months ago. We moved because Mom finally walked out on my asshole of a father, who writes movies for a living–although as none of them ever got made, it would be more accurate to say that he writes scripts for a living. Mom is an art teacher, and she paints her own stuff, too, and she says there are millions of people in Berkeley with an artistic bend or whatever, so she thought we’d feel right at home here. (I like it that she says ‘we’. I haven’t got an artistic bone in my whole body, and she knows that, but for some reason she thinks I take after her. It was pretty much always me and her against him, so that became me and her against L.A., and because I was against L.A., that somehow made me able to paint. I don’t mind. Painting’s pretty cool, some of it.)
     
    Berkeley’s nice, I guess, but I didn’t have any friends here, so Mom made me join this dumb jazz orchestra thing. I’d just started to take trumpet lessons in L.A., and I didn’t suck too bad; a couple months after we moved, she saw an ad in a local bookstore for something called the Little Berkeley Big Band, which is like for people under the age of seventeen, and she signed me up. She had to sing the Ac-cent-chu-ate song a lot in the car the first evening I went to a rehearsal, because I’d be the first to admit that I wasn’t feeling very positive. But it was OK, not that I’d ever admit that to her. You can make a pretty fucking great noise when you’re part of a horn section. I can’t say I’m going to make any friends, though. The kind of people who want to play in the Little Berkeley Big Band…well, let’s just say that they’re not my kind of people. Apart from Martha, but I’ll tell you about her later. (And now you’ll probably have guessed some of the ending, but I don’t care, because you only know her name, and not how we ended up having sex. How we ended up having sex is the interesting part.) All you need to know about Martha: a) She’s hot; b) but hot in a not-slutty way. In other words, if you saw her, you would never guess in a million years that I’d persuade her to sleep with me. (Hopefully that has made you very curious–‘Man, how the fuck did he get to sleep with her?’–which means you’ll