Amplification

Amplification

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 11

Tom Bass

A granite jetty extends along one edge of the river mouth at Matagorda. Toby paddles across a brackish river on a surfboard. His face is burnt and peeling on his cheeks; his hair is far from short; his body is unmarred. Any money goes for petrol and wax and snacks from a bait shop.

The river carries him towards the soupy ocean but he easily arrives on the opposite bank. He grabs the fiberglass surfboard marked up with logos and marches across the wild salt flats, on one side the red river, on the other the brown ocean. His board is clamped in his armpit. In the hot, hazy distance a big rusted iron tank is buoyed to the land. The tide is out, and the usually nocturnal crabs are out too. Toby smashes some in a moronic manner. But his attention is gradually drawn to the perfect swells that are peeling left and right just offshore, the line-up empty.

Hooting, hollering, he races into the surf, paddles through the foam, pushing under the breakers, the waves like watery crowns on his back. He makes it over the sandbars where the swells are unbroken and the ocean is blue-brown glass.

His legs dangle in camaraderie in the bath-like water. A collar on his ankle and a rubber chord leash him to the board. Sets of swells are coming at him and he identifies the one he wants.

The penultimate wave in the set is the biggest, the most perfect.

He turns and paddles in anticipation of the point when the ocean’s energy will take over. The curling face picks him up and he must simultaneously stand and drop down. The board flicks under his brown feet and carves ahead of the breaking lip. He catches a fine, feral thing. The board turns and slashes at the wave’s surface, in the face, at the lip, then decelerates for the slow-motion-like cover of the tube, before it jets out for a rousing finish in spray and exhilaration.

He immediately paddles out for more liquid ecstasy.

Toby repeatedly cuts and tucks under the falling lip, covered by the elliptical tube for a few seconds until he is spit out. He floats to a finish over the shoulder of wave before he deals with the whitewater.

A porpoise startles him. Large shapes often are sharks attracted to the river that dumps plenty of edible items in the gulf. The porpoise joins him on a wave and he feels that nature was better than anyone could have ever expected.

The wave holds him down in the sand and squeezes him like an enormous hand and he is surprised by the whiteness of the water and the whiteness of the sky, that he is in fact still a dude when he returns to the surface, spluttering and ready for more of the waves and absolutely nothing else—certainly not expecting a return to soccer practice or high school.

Over the chain link fence separating the running track from the strip mall, the air-conditioning units are roaring. The adjoining playing fields and parking lots shimmer with sun. Members of the track team are sprinting around the field. Some jocks are running in the bleachers.

Toby stands on the soccer pitch. It’s August. There are no waves. The gulf is as liquid as glass. School hasn’t started. The sun’s blazing, the fortieth consecutive record day of heat. The air is pure humidity, a barrier that everyone struggles against during the drills to determine the varsity squad. Who can trap and kick and head and pass and dribble? It certainly isn’t any incarnation of Josh, Eric or Chad who approach the ball in an off-kilter way, part love, part loathing.

Coach Madar rubs his nylon shorts and pulls his clipboard from the waistband, making notes about the teams for the weekend scrimmage.

Toby jokes with the center back and goalie when the ball runs down the field at the foot of no one. He runs out to meet it. Toby doesn’t bother to trap it and control it first but gives it a big boot with a clunk of Adidas.

But the ball skips over something unanticipated—a clump of dried mud or sprinkler head or dimple in the field—and he scissors at nothing but thick air. He launches forward and panics midstream with all the momentum of his kick. This is not a relaxed fall of non-consequence. His arm is tucked under his guts and he twists when he comes in contact the hard dun grass. He screams, not in any way associated with joy, wonder or ecstasy, but pain. The wrist is instantly a step, the interval between the two notes that are oscillating from his larynx. Something is poking at the surface of his skin as he thrashes on the corrugated surface of the grass crying and baying.

The teams gather around him. Coach Madar shoos everyone away and lifts Toby up in his bearish arms and runs him to his car, the best way to the emergency room.

Madar asks him questions, trying to distract him from the pain from which there is no distracting.

What’s your favorite color?

Blue.

What’s your grandma’s name?

Momma Empire. She’s dead.

What’s your dog’s name?

Hannibal.

Who is your favorite band?

DK.

What class is your favorite?

Chemistry.

Why chemistry?

Because it’s easy.

Who’s going to win the first match this fall?

Not me.

His car is veering along the frontage road past the leafy suburbs.

How are your grades?

Better than OK.

Where do want to go to school?

I dunno.

What are you going to study?

Science.

Have you gotten laid yet?

Uh-huh. Cindy Sin.

Do you do drugs?

I’d like to.

Toby’s arm is cradled on the dash. It’s turning into a bat. Each jerk of the car ratchets up the pain. Someone could be quartering the arm. Someone could be applying pliers. Someone could be pouring pitch over it. Instead it’s there, angry and communicative, not the neutral limb of daily use. This is the result of too cavalier an attitude, not clashes with bigger players.

The car speeds to the emergency room, Madar shifting his way through the traffic fumes and heat.

“My orthodontist’s on the other side of the complex.” Toby grimaces.

“Today it’s a different reason, kid.”

Toby is simpering in short sharp stretches when Coach Madar brings him in.

He’s better once he gets a room. Toby gives his statistics to his latest accomplishment in klutz-hood, while his parents are located.

Surgery will be his reward that afternoon. He’s dislocated one bone and broken the other. He has been administered all the good drugs and he neither feels nor remembers anything. Toby does not wake up on the operating table to find that nothing has happened yet, that the surgeons are still working on someone else. The break is complicated and a good doctor is not on hand. Someone pins the bits together. He learns what is agony in the aftermath.

Every year brings a new escalation and real consequences that Toby might not otherwise understand if not subjected to the intricacies of his arm. The break destroys the growth plate of the radius in his forearm and it refuses to grow while the ulna surges ahead. The arm’s a bow of pure pain.

Wyatt and Noemi resort to the doctor who has also torn open Toby’s knees in order to make him a soccer star.

Doctor Butter is the first to recommend a surgical solution. He’s keen on an osteotamy; what’s wrong with having one arm shorter than the other?

Toby kind of likes the idea of another procedure and health insurance pays for it.

In the freezing basement of a hospital complex at dawn Toby’s clothes join the floor of the changing room. The gown is hard and cold. Personnel bustle around the clinical surfaces of the pre-op hall, a bunker. Routine questions about allergic reactions follow from the anesthetist as his vital signs are taken. His heart beats its slow athletic pulse. The blood on the top of Toby’s hand waits for the fructose drip. He climbs on the gurney and confirms that he isn’t having a leg amputated or a tumor excised or lips sewn together.

The anesthetist is from South Africa. He peers through his body hair and twangs. “It’s like beers, boy. One beer. Two beers. Three. Four. Five. Six….”

The anesthesia ripples up Toby’s veins.

“What you like, kid? Miller or the King, kid? Kid?”

The liquid coldly surges into his heart and wades up into his brain-spout.

“The King,” Toby manages to slur, but he cannot manage the brewing slogan as the anesthesia digs its fangs into his circuit. Some residue of what happens under the bright halogen appears in his consciousness: scalpel, saw, smoking bone, clamps, suction, a bright piece of surgical steel that hold the bits together, adjustments, drill, screws, tightening, sutures, then the vague shades of the post-op ward.

Toby has been administered morphine. There are only shadows and the moving, speaking box in the corner that is intermittently consciousness. His spoon hangs in a plastic bottle, it takes him days to relieve the pressure. His mind and kidneys are crashed on opiates. One day the pain fades and everything is gray and neutral. He can move around the ward and soon go home with his arm in a fiberglass cast.

The plate Dr. Butter has screwed in place is not prepared for what Toby has in mind when he says, “Do what you like.” Dr. Butter imagines golf, tennis at most. Though one of his bones has been cut in half and screwed together with a strip of metal, Toby is insistent on getting back to the surf and turf.

A hurricane's approaching. It’s a month after Doctor Butter’s osteotomy and Toby's already at football practice when he decides to take up an offer to drive for a storm session. There are no other priorities. He cannot really play anyway.

Toby gives Sean and Deon the nod when he hears the Nissan honking in the school parking lot, his board shining among the quiver lashed on the car’s roof. The sky is grim and low and the clouds move faster than the little car—blowing down the highway towards the beach, banging with the Residents, Cabaret Voltaire or Misfits for good measure.

“Which break, dude?” Deon already went once before school.

Toby smacks at some gum. “The harbor, dude. We need rocks, not sand, dude.”

“Gorda?” Sean pulls his hair back into a ponytail.

“Too far, dude,” says Deon, confidently pushing the Nissan hatchback further down the coastal highway towards the storm.

“Freeport?” Toby hazards.

“I was thinking, dude, I would be so stoked if the harbor’s breaking. Epic.”

Joshing and one-upmanship punctuate the sallies of dude, dude, dude.

They’re in sight of the monsters breaking over the harbor jetty when the local sheriff apprehends the Nissan at a roadblock. He has closed down the town of Freeport, thus the jetty, due to the storm.

“Fuckin’ asshole!” Deon and Sean shout as they u-turn.

Toby looks at the wonderful lines of breakers that are indeed peeling down the harbor mouth. They will have to settle for a less prime spot. The sandbars and prevailing wind are not choreographed enough to make good waves and it’s a fantastic struggle to get through the sloppy surf to the cleaner break far out.

Toby’s fiberglass cast taps against his board, like against like, and somehow he makes it out into the big slushy things knocking against one another like breasts. Toby hollers at the noisy waves and slides down their untidy faces and wishes the wind would turn offshore and clean up the towering surf, but it’s impudent to ask any more from the angry ocean, he knows.

Tunes and junk food wait for them in the car rocking in the wind. Sean and Deon are dosing on the swells far out in the melee of brown water.

Afterwards the cast smells like the ocean. Toby notices it in class, the arm’s vague rueful pong; he sprays it down with Wyatt’s Old Spice every few days. It attracts flies in class and ants on the soccer field. It is also agony whether he runs or walks. He figures it’s merely sore. He does not tell anyone. At night the cockroaches cluster on the ceiling of his room and fly down to his bed, his body sprawled in front of the oscillating metal fan. The arm is ripening. They scuttle and sniff under the edges of the cast when Toby sleeps; they are waiting for him when he wraps the beast in plastic and ducks into the mildew-lined shower; they pursue him from the oak trees on the swampy walk to school; they live in his locker. The cast must come off before Toby’s arm turns into agar-agar.

Before the x-ray Doctor Butter boozily congratulates himself in one of the rooms of his practice. An assistant cuts off the putrid fiberglass with a vibrating electric saw, not without a gash to Toby’s elbow, and his arm emerges: a black haired newborn. It neither smells nor looks perfect. When Dr. Butter notches the x-rays into the light box Toby sees that he has foiled the surgeon. The arm is still sawn in half. He has snapped the metal plate in the hurricane.

After this meeting there are no more sports. Surprised that is has not rotted off, Doctor Butter allows Toby’s arm a few weeks in a removable cast, enough for him to wash the foreign appendage and let it dry in the sun, prior to the resumption of the fiberglass cast wrapped to his armpit.

The arm is immobilized. Toby sleeps with a shackle-like magnetic device to stimulate the bone. He grows morose and depressed; his energy is grounded; the bone does nothing.

Holding a later x-ray in his liver-spotted hand, Doctor Butter says, “Blows cannot be avoided. It takes courage to let things heal.”

Some solace that is.

Toby has had enough of the shriveled, emaciated, atrophied thing, never allowed out to play. Toby is clearly the culprit in finishing it off.

He’s thankful for the invitation from his rich friends to go to the country club. He dives from the high board into the pool and ruins the shreds of metal plate in its entirety.

Doctor Butter will summarily scrape off the colony of tissue in the gap, will insert a beefy piece of metal appropriate for a thigh, will screw the wrist together again. Things will go according to plan.

In a bid to restore order Toby is frequently a guest of the physical therapy unit in the cold hospital basement. In cahoots with Doctor Butter, the physical therapists practice their brand of torture to resuscitate the deformed arm: electric stimulation, ultrasound, weights, all kinds of lifting in the name of rehabilitation. Toby admires the brittle pieces of steel that have been removed from his arm and enjoy the slowly returning appendage.

A roasted black girl is brought down from her ward most afternoons. Nodes of flesh are tied to her body. Her face is almost non-existent, grafts covering what is left of the bone. The physical terrorists stretch her twisted, gnarled body on a rack. The girl starts to wear a mask and seems determined to live.

Toby realizes he’s in a great position; he wasn’t set alight by Wyatt only to live with pink and black dots for eyes.

No one can contain the fall, that certain combination of time and space on a certain afternoon when the waves are turning over the break and the sun takes on a particular whiteness, when speed and confidence are at their peak and thus dear wet jeopardy as the faces scream, treacherous and complete.

The orange wing is dedicated to science. The vectors and forces of teenagers are constrained to plain desks in the rooms. The orange doors are wide open since the air-conditioning has deceased on this muggy day. Grades nine through twelve are wrestling with any of the subject’s key words: cell respiration, photosynthesis, the photoelectric effect, mitochondrial DNA, chromosomes, mitosis, meiosis, equilibria, entropy, enthalpy, the periodic table, vectors, force. It’s when any of the key words become practice — dissection of a fetal pig on a bed of wax, sublimation of iodine under the chemical hood — that it makes any sense.

Rows of orange lockers line the entrance to the O-wing, quiet until the bell signals the end of the learning period. A gush of students fills the upstairs and downstairs halls of the orange wing. Its counterparts radiate from the library: red (math), blue (history), gray (English) and green (art).

Toby fumbles with a combination lock—left, right, left, the march of order and combinations—extracts a Norton reader. Why not catch up on the Ancient Mariner in chemistry? Some soft, crumbling pages expurgate themselves from the broken spine.

The school’s permanent pupil, Dwayne—mullet, cut-off denim jacket, Anthrax T-shirt, black parachute pants—lifts the latch to his orange locker coated with what is left of remedial algebra from last week pressed into an amalgam of exploded ink and Hot Tamales. Dwayne rummages for a pack of Camels, already pondering whether to cut class in favor of hooky across the highway after a five-finger discount on the new Ratt album in Sound Exchange. Tests are like the wind to Dwayne.

A substitute teacher glowers at the conflagration. No one among the staff has been too successful teaching. They have been imprisoned for years with the farts and acne of teenagers. What to explain about intellectual curiosity? That music is math or that sex is chemistry? Who would believe it?

Certainly not the pair of burly jocks molesting Cindy Soon while she checks her blunt face smeared with orange foundation. A mirror hangs on her orange locker door. She is unperturbed by the meaty hands grappling her box.

Toby’s locker is next to hers and he has a good view while he redials the combination under the pretext of a forgotten pencil. Toby is curious about Cindy Soon and what she just might offer.

The bell rings and the crowd thins disappear behind the orange doors and sit at the orange desks waiting for Miss Pea to scuttle in, trailing a tail of cigarette smoke from the toxic teachers lounge.

The nerds are tardy due to a slobber session over David’s new Hewlett Packard calculator. Miss Pea says nothing as they lurch into class.

It’s rowdy. A paper airplane glazes the fluorescent lights. Slats of sunshine carve up the periodic chart. The pupils are perched on stools around the lab. The school is well equipped due to the district’s rich residents and the property tax.

Toby looks in reverence at the column of noble gases, inert, refusing to react. Everyone stares at Miss Pea’s hair — orange and vaguely radiating under the ivy leaf from Einstein’s Princeton lab framed on the wall. Miss Pea is a disciple.

“Chemistry,” she says. She adjusts her spectacles. “Chemistry isn't for failures.” Miss Pea’s weekly theoretical and practical lab exams are tough but somehow this week Toby is not among the roll call.

“Azzad, Chung, Evans, Klein, O'Reilly, Nyugen, Taller, Siegler—today, none of you have names. You can consult with me after class about your results.” The curve does not save anyone from duress.

Miss Pea’s sense of fairness allows a second try. Today, chalk and talk. Ziegler rehashes her unsuccessful solution on the blackboard. At Miss Pea’s prompting, the class’s collective brain whirls into action to comprehend and calculate the normality of acids, the molality of bases, the equilibrium of reactions and the rate of catalysts; they write out the laborious proofs that support the world of chemicals, the measure of the atom (in moles), the electron shells and bonds (that’s quantum theory), and deviations into the chemical soup of amino acids that Mister Kermit is refreshing downstairs in biology. Miss Pea moves her team through the proofs, bosses everyone through the periodical table and the implications of its structure.

The pupils are immigrants in her lab, clucking over formulae and belaboring proofs, studying and working for powers that Miss Pea reveals to be powers like defense and industry, war and profit, which depend on the machine of good science that begins in the orange hall. The proof solves problems of logic and by default reality. It’s not up to her to explain to them that there are other possibilities, but Miss Pea hints it applies elsewhere. She lures the pupils to the assignment with Bunsen burners, digital scales, Erlenmeyer flasks, spectrum analysis.

Miss Pea paces the room, puffs in the ship of learning’s sails to get everyone to the actual experiment after the procedure and its complex formulas that might or might not confirm the hypothesis whether the reaction applies to the first or second law of thermodynamics (entropy and enthalpy), an absolute-zero Kelvin vacuum, crystal lattices or any other trick of the trade. She douses fires, washes a clumsy face at the eyewash station, sweeps up Pyrex glassware inadvertently dropped onto the cement floor, makes sure Toby recalibrates his pipettes when he rewrites the calm conclusion to observations of the mystery reagent—doled out by Miss Pea.

Miss Pea does not crack when the collective brain expires from her regimen. The team of Azzad and Thaller have already captured the district’s chemistry prize and she relents to the class’s protest for more time when it’s the week of the final exam.

The test is only five questions; numbers two and four stump everyone. She does not expect anyone to answer correctly, but she accepts Toby’s application to be lab assistant next year on the basis of his right answers to numbers two and four that orient him in the chemical landscape of her class. He wants to synthesize plants more than humans.

Miss Pea does not realize that she is accepting an intruder in her storeroom when Toby returns that autumn. The metal shelves are lined with reagents in their thick glass or plastic jars. They are safe and inert for the moment, not the horrifying jars of pickled animals and humans in the biology lab. Toby has access to her lab with high orange-lacquered worktables and nests of stools. His job is to reliably mix the chemicals for the other classes. He looks at her brightly through the cheap goggles cutting into his face and she takes him for an enthusiastic assistant. The world is open and it has yet to close. He knows what she is talking about when Miss Pea summons everyone to her desk for a view of the colloid changing colors in the flask.

She does not know Toby has burrowed from her supply of glassware to supply Tyler and Ed with a freebase pipe. She doesn’t know he’s lifted enough K and P to keep Cedric in the Rasta business. She doesn’t know about the MDMA and amphetamine cranked out with ingredients and supplies clearly itemized on her purchase orders to the school district administration.

Tyler and Ed give him the recipe and Dwayne has been vital for advice. They don’t think Toby can do it, but there it is, absorbing into his fingers, which are darting among the caplets multiplying in the Zip-lock bag, three hundred 500 mg gelatin caps. He’s careful not to lick his fingers.

Two hits for twenty-five dollars is the price. This isn’t the cash from throwing papers, feeding cats, mowing lawns or any of the other chores of adolescence.

On a Friday night at the yet-to-be Four Corners suburban development Toby will sell out of caplets. The kids are gathered in the empty lots for a keg party. There are no houses. Toby cannot vouch for what the pills are like other than that they are good. Risk is part of the game. What is happening is already a bad omen for the development.

Cars, jeeps and pick-ups are burning rubber and power braking in one quarter of Four Corners. In another stretch kids are drunkenly playing softball, batting at cups of beers. A cup of beer is dispensed for a dollar from the kegs in the beds of a half-circle of pickups in a cul-de-sac. Toby has plenty after a few transactions. Other kids are dealing also and the number of people lurching around indicates the deals are working. The truck doors are open and throbbing with the Cult or Public Enemy. Someone has outfitted the gunwales of his car with noble neon. The party is fueled by the plausibility that the sheriff will not make it his business to figure out what are the lights and noise in Four Corners.

Nicole or Stacy from school mauls Toby in the back seat of a car for a handful of the pills. It seems to desiccate his spine. His heart beats in his palette. He is elated and confessional. He suddenly cannot find Nicole or Stacy (she has left the car grinding off her molars) and it’s to his surprise that he finds himself drumming his fingers in the hands of Cindy Soon, who doesn’t say a thing, not a thing, as the rhythm of the potion keeps on ticking through their bodies squatting on the cement curb.

“There is music in chemistry,” he tells her and she is naturally bewildered by what he might have concluded—blacking out and thanking Miss Pea.

Cindy Soon saunters through school in a knowing way. Her walk attracts comments from girls and guys alike. At her discrete invitation, a note dropped through the vents of his locker, Toby walks to her apartment. It’s dank and dark inside. An iguana sleeps in a terrarium in her room festooned with white crepe and cotton gauze.

“Can I touch you?” he asks.

Somehow she’s charmed by his naiveté, unlike the typical guy she might romp with, and she consents.

His mouth moves from her lips to her freckled cleavage and further down to her plump sweet-smelling navel and the strawberry abyss beyond. He’s clearly agitated when she asks that he desist. She pushes him away with her stubby, ribbed fingers. Cindy Soon expects her mom at any moment. Her sclerotic nipples poke through her ZZ-top concert T-shirt and her swollen vulva is all too evident through her dripping panties when she closes the door and Toby takes off through the apartment complex past the liquor stores, groceries and restaurants next to the busy frontage road of the highway. The traffic flows like a phosphorescent worm—segments insert and delete, blink and twine together.

Toby’s trysts with Cindy Soon gets serious when he crawls out his bathroom window and pads into the humid night. The security light clicks on when his arm catches the detector’s beam. Wyatt and Noemi are locked to the rules of their embrace when he tiptoes down the road, splattered with an occasional patty of lovelorn frog, to a rendezvous with Cindy Soon at the gas station cum mini-mart.

Cindy’s waiting with Carla, who promptly leaves as soon as he saddles up next to Cindy’s head and gently caresses it. Cindy spills her cola and smiles and brushes back her fiery hair. Perspiration beads on her throat. He flips out biting her cherry-flavored mouth and she grabs at him and squeezes a handful of anxiousness.

He sits for a moment before she nods, takes his hand, places it on her pussy and leads him in the darkness to the grounds of the nearby Catholic church and school. Schoolgirls have been a constant source of excitement for him from the cover of his room within peeping distance of the parking lot.

Cindy urges Toby up the chain-link fence next to the roof and onto the hot, flat, tar and pebble surface of their bed for the night. The air’s acrid and tart with the exhalation of the refineries outside the city. Cindy takes off her denim jacket, lies down on it and she soon makes Toby feel older and wiser as she offers her freckled body in such a natural and comfortable way. Cindy Soon assails him and he fumbles back at the sack of ginger hair and juices among the air-conditioners and skylights. Toby squirms, does what he thinks is the idea. He samples her wet parts and drains his pubescent ideas into the condom notched between the two of them. She hugs his butt when he climaxes and breathes a mist of diet Coke.

Cindy Soon knows the score more than him, along with the likes of Miss Pea or any other of the girls that slip in under his sonar up there on the roof of the church school.

Cindy unswivels the padlock from her locker, puzzled and nonplussed by Toby’s silence as he grovels for his books later that week.

“Toby, do you have any more X?”

Up next: Brettonwood