“Here’s some PEZ,” I said, handing a stranger a handful of the colorful candy as I joyously exited my journalism classroom. “Happy Birthday!” The stranger stopped and stared with a furrowed brow at what I had thrust into his palm as I continued down the hall.
Rounding the corner to enter the narrow walkway behind the library, I almost collided with one of the school’s cheerleaders decked out in her red and white vest and pleated skirt. “Excuse me,” she said nervously as she tried to go around me.
“Molly! Hi! Want some PEZ?” Molly was easily recognized throughout the male population of our high school as the most beautiful girl in all of Centralia, possibly all of Illinois. She was adored by all of the guys and idolized by the girls. When she received a pink Geo Tracker for her sixteenth birthday, several other girls in town quickly pleaded with their parents for the same type of car (in a different color, of course, so their emulation would not be too overt). When my friends and I passed her car as we cruised through town, our eyes left the road and followed her driving past us, and we made it a point to cruise by her house on a nightly basis, our stereos playing a Nirvana song with her name in the title loudly as we passed.
I found her crying in her pink Tracker one day after school. Working on the school newspaper had kept me there after hours, and she had just left cheerleading practice. Apparently her popularity was not all it was cracked up to be. Boys leered at her and made crude jokes at her expense; girls, jealous of her looks and the attention she received because of them, made fun of her constantly. That day two of her fellow cheerleaders had not even bothered to wait until she was out of earshot to call her a dirty whore. I consoled her as best I could, which was not all that much considering my nervousness in the presence of greatness.
“Why are you giving out candy?” she asked me as she peered apprehensively into the bag I held before her.
“It’s my birthday.” Her eyebrow raised, and I could tell she was still confused by my reply. When I didn’t volunteer more information, she just shrugged and reached in to get some candy.
As she dug through the bag, I looked at her face. Her eyebrows plunged downward as if being pressed upon by some great weight, and I couldn’t help but apologize to her. “I’m sorry.”
She looked up at me, her dark green eyes meeting mine briefly before returning to the bag below. “For what?”
“You know, the rumors.” Earlier that year I had somehow managed the courage to ask her out one day during our public speaking class, and she had agreed to go to a movie with me. But on the day of our date a rumor started going around the school that we had had sex at school, the location varying with each person telling the rumor. I only found out when some guy congratulated me for my achievement as if it were actually true. I apologized profusely all night for the rumors, denied any sort of involvement in their starting, appeared at her door bearing flowers and candy to make up for it. She accepted my apology but it never seemed to be enough.
She smiled at me lightly as if it were no big deal and said, “I know you had nothing to do with it. Besides, I’m kind of used to it.” Her eyes refused to meet mine when she said these words, though, concentrating intently on the PEZ in the bag, and I knew that the rumors still hurt, no matter how many times she had to deal with the same sort of problem or how much she convinced herself she wouldn’t let them get to her.
She started to walk away then, but I called after her. She stopped and turned back towards me. “Are you sure you got enough? Take some more.” I held the bag open for her again.
She shrugged again in response. “No thanks,” she mumbled demurely and quietly shuffled away.
“Hey!” I shouted again, unable to let her walk away from me so sadly. “We’ll have to go time travelling again sometime.”
The reference to the movie we had seen on our date, A Perfect World, actually brought a smile to her face when she turned back towards me. “We will. I had a lot of fun talking to you that night.” Then she turned and walked away, this time a tad more confidence in her stride.
I kept on walking down the confined hall teeming with my fellow students, throwing PEZ to all who passed me and repeatedly chanting my incantation, “Have some PEZ. Happy Birthday! Here! Take some PEZ.” This narrow passageway behind the library had never been meant to be a regular path for students, instead serving only as a route into the storage spaces for old books. But the principal had recently disallowed students from cutting through the library at the head librarian’s request, forcing traffic into the constricted hall.
I continued to hand out PEZ happily as I walked down the cramped corridor, but all the while I nervously tried to fight the sense of claustrophobia that the hall imposed upon me. The tall white walls were less than four feet apart, making it extremely difficult for people moving in both directions to pass each other without repeated collisions. A slow walker in front of me only made the problem worse, prolonging my time trapped between these thinly separated and blank walls.
I was relieved when I finally escaped the hall’s confines to find my best friend Miller standing at his locker. “Hey, how were the birthday festivities?” he asked me as he set his bag on the floor and crammed his folders and textbooks from the bottom of the locker into the thin, red, vinyl knapsack.
“Crazy,” I said to him, twisting the combination lock on my locker and opening the door. “If I never eat PEZ again, that’s fine by me.”
“Sacrilege,” he said with a smirk, donning a Cubs hat before closing his locker door. He slyly eyed my plastic grocery bag as I removed the four PEZ dispensers tied with gray yarn around my collar and hung them on a hook in my locker. “Can I have some?” he asked me, extending an open hand.
“Help yourself.” I dropped the bag into his hand so that he caught it by the handles and fidgeted with the necklace I still had on before collecting what little homework I had to take home with me.
Miller’s eyes were wide with surprise behind his glasses. “You were handing them out one at a time during English third hour.”
I picked up a library book about the films of Orson Welles off the floor of my locker. “At lunch I realized that if I kept it up, doling them out like that one by one, I’d still have almost all of it left at the end of the day.” I looked at the book in my hand. Like I’ll have time to work on the paper this weekend. I threw the book back in the locker and the toy Dalek on the top shelf fell over due to the jolt. I set it rightside up before slamming the door shut. It’s not due ‘til next Friday anyway, I reasoned.
Miller held the Wal-Mart bag open and stared deep into it, his chin hanging loose as if it had come unhinged. “So much PEZ still! I feel like I could stick my whole arm in there like it’s Mary Poppins’ bag or something.”
I nodded. “And that’s after I’ve been giving them out by the armload to folks in the hall half the day.”
I started to walk down the hall toward the stairs, Miller trailing along behind me slowly picking through the bag. “You should have stopped at thirty bucks’ worth.”
“I know that now,” I said, “but I sort of got used to the routine. Every night getting off work, going to Wal-Mart and buying a packet of ten with some of my tip money. I knew I had too much but for some reason I kept buying.”
“You’re a PEZ addict, my friend.” Miller smiled, handing me back the bag after having found four or five of his favorite flavor, lemon.
“Not after today. I’m quitting cold turkey.”
“Sure you are. ‘I can quit anytime I want to.’ The mantra of the true PEZ junkie.” We both laughed.
Miller walked off to talk to one of his teachers, and I shouted after him, “See you tomorrow morning!”
“Sure,” he replied. “Just don’t oversleep!”
I laughed and moved slowly on to the parking lot, occasionally being accosted by this person or that for some free candy, all the while thinking to myself, Actually, it was a pretty good day. For seventeen, the non-birthday that it is. I had been the big man on campus that day, even more than on days when I roamed the halls with a camera dangling from my neck to take candids for the school newspaper. Everybody wanted what I had, and even if it they just grabbed some candy from me and walked away, it still made me feel good. I was a hit today. Everybody liked me just for being the goofball that I am. It feels nice.
As I crossed the parking lot headed for my car, I smiled to myself. There it is, my new car. God, what a beautiful day, I thought to myself as I moved closer to my car, looking at it happily like I was greeting an old friend I had known for years.
The car was a birthday present from my uncle Wes. It had been his car, but he wouldn’t need it anymore. Now it’s mine, all mine, and I don’t care if it’s boxy and gray and a Chrysler and an old lady car. It’s mine and that’s all that matters. Soon I’ll have my personalized plates and it’ll be official.
Uncle Wes had sold me the car, actually, for tax purposes only. If it had been a gift, I would have had to pay taxes on the amount the car booked for. Since it was a sale, I only had to pay taxes in respect to the sale price, which had been a dollar. My mother didn’t have a dollar on her when she paid him for the car, there in the hospital room, so she borrowed one from his wallet on the table nearby and promised to pay him back eventually.
But eventually’s not going to come, a voice inside of me cried out. He’s going to die before it gets here. The real price for your car is a life, his life.
I pushed these thoughts away as I put the key into the door lock. “It’s mine,” I whispered to that voice defiantly as I got in. When the voice made no reply, I sighed and turned the key in the ignition, ready to wind the day down.
As my car started the radio came on, joining the female broadcaster in mid-sentence. Strange, there ought to be music. This is key driving time, I thought to myself a little dejectedly before putting my car into drive to pull out of the lot. I want to hear some Nirvana. Is that too much to ask for on my birthday?
My hand stopped on the gear knob before I could move it, and I cocked my head to hear the radio DJ better. Did she just say someone was dead? I moved my hand down to the volume control and turned it up.
I had not been mistaken. The woman on the radio said, “Cobain was found dead, apparently having committed suicide only days after disappearing from a rehab clinic in his hometown of Aberdeen. The Seattle news stations are saying that...”
My face winced from the blow of the words, and my eyes glazed over with terror for a moment. Kurt’s dead? I questioned myself internally, trying to get a handle on what I had just heard. It can’t be true.
But it was. The news reports continued and my shock remained unabated. After a minute or two, I noticed in my rearview mirror Miller walking past me to his car. He hasn’t heard yet, I thought to myself as I watched him strut merrily by. He needs to know. I got out of my car and headed towards him slowly, calling out his name once to get him to stop. My feet dragged as if they were glued to the ground.
“No, I don’t want any more PEZ,” he said to me with a mockingly forceful tone. “You’re just going to have to eat the damn things yourself. I’m not getting stuck with them.” He stopped then when he saw I wasn’t laughing, and his face quickly changed to mirror the seriousness he saw in my expression.
I looked him firmly in the eye and said, “I just heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain shot himself.”
All the energy seemed to drain out of him and pool at his feet there on the pavement. His face went pale and his entire body almost seemed to go limp. He mumbled to me weakly, “I’ve gotta go.” Somehow he managed to turn away from me and, as if suddenly revitalized, sprint for his car as fast as he could.
I watched him as he sped off, thinking to myself, God, he acted as if it was a family member who had died. But I knew how he felt. As I walked back to my car, it became hard for me to breathe, as if someone had kicked me in the stomach and forced the air out of me in a rush, leaving me wheezing softly for air.
I opened my car door and sat down in the driver’s seat, placing my hands limply on the wheel. The car was still on; the radio announcers were still talking, again relaying the news that Kurt was dead. I started to shut the car door again, but the foreboding I had felt earlier in the hall was returning, making my head swim. I left the door open and breathed deeply.
The bag of PEZ sat in the passenger seat beside me and I stared at it, listening to the words from the radio as they drifted to me in fragments. “...found dead in his home...” the woman said. I heard her use the words “apparently self-inflicted” and “shotgun beside him” but I kept staring at the bright colored candies in the plastic bag.
I finally turned from them to look at the radio. The woman kept talking but I didn’t hear her. I was only looking at the time. 3:27. I don’t have time for this. My shift starts in an hour and a half.
When the clock reached 3:34, I thought to myself angrily, Come on! I don’t have time for this SHIT! Reach over, close the door, put the car in drive, and go home! He’s just some rock star I didn’t even know. The long chain of my necklace weighed heavily around my neck, pulling my head down further and further.
My hands remained on the wheel, now tightly gripping it, ringing it in my hands like a wet washcloth. My eyes focused on the Chrysler emblem in the center of the wheel. This is my car. This car is mine now. It’s my birthday today. Happy Birthday! Here, have some PEZ. Here, have a car. My eyes slowly began to look through the wheel as if it weren’t even there. Everything in my vision became a blur.
It’s not yours yet, some inner voice said to me. You’re just borrowing it from your uncle. My sight was further distorted as this inner voice spoke to me further. He’s not dead yet.
I challenged the voice aloud. “But he will be soon,” I said to myself, the words little more than a garbled mass of phlegm caught in the back of my throat. I relinquished my hold on the wheel and tried to wipe my eyes clean. I felt a longing to be held, for someone to come to my car and offer me reassurance, but there was no one.
With my hand now free, I reached over to the plastic bag and pulled out a roll of PEZ. It was orange. God, I hate this stuff, I thought to myself as I unwrapped the candy and popped all twelve pieces into my mouth at once. After a moment, I was able to clear my throat, and I sniffed and snorted as I rubbed away the wetness from my eyes.
“I don’t need this,” I whispered to myself quietly. But still the car door was open. Still the radio played. And still I sat there in my uncle’s car, listening to the radio report the death of a stranger in a state of shock.
