All The Cool Kids Smoke

The principal of our school waved me out of his office. I went down the hall and when I got to the library, Mike Manson and Tom Feldman were being chewed out by the librarian. The way she was going off you’d think they were planning to torch the joint or something. Lianne Thompson paradoxically had a body where everything was tight and flat, yet somehow managed to be what Patrick Bateman would call a ‘hardbody’ all at once. Bluntman and Chronic over there snickered and kept their eyes firmly glued to her button-up blouse. She was completely oblivious, or acted she was, to the fact that they brayed like donkeys at a petting zoo just to get her attention. After she left and they got enough of an eyeful for their fantasies that night, I sat down and joined them. Tom’s finishing his maths while Mike’s pissing the time away. He has a Stephen King anthology in front of him, open to the first page of “Sometimes They Come Back.” Figures.

“So what’d principal Pinhead want?”

The principal here tries to bang almost every girl who’s a Sophmore and over – our state’s age of consent is sixteen – so we joke the old perv’s one of the Cenobites from Hellraiser. Everyone knows this, but no one sez anything. We’ve mostly learned to ignore him.

“No goddam clue. For real, he just shot the shit. I think he wants to get into my cousin’s pants and he was trying to feel out what he could.”  

We let out a collective ‘pffft’. Old fuck pro’ly thinks he’s Lee Marvin in ‘Point Blank’ and that he can bed any chick he wants even at his age.  

From where we’re sitting, if we lean back we can see through the library’s double doors, down the short hallway and into the main foyer. Just as I do, Dolph Schreck rounds a corner and enters the library. He breezes past the front desk and Ms. Thompson barely looks up when he enters. He slips into the fourth seat at our table. Dolph is a drama geek and the reason he’s wearing a period-accurate Waffen-SS uniform with Gruppenführer ranks is that he’s playing Hermann Fegelein in our school’s production of ‘Downfall’. He tells us they even have a pyrotechnics budget this year – they’ll set two mannequins on fire right there on the stage for the scene where they burn Hitler and Eva’s bodies.

The four of us look around at each other.

“Come on assholes”, Dolph schmoozes, “smoke break.”

Behind the school we each have a smoke, and Dolph takes out a Walther PPK.

“It’s plastic. I swiped it from the props department.”

“You gonna return it?”

“’Course I’m gonna return it. It’s the piece they execute me with.”

“Shouldn’t that be a machine gun?”

“Hm?”

“In the movie they mowed down Fegelein in front of the Chancellery.”

“According to Traudl Jung’s memoir on which the movie is based, Fegelein was taken out to the Chancellery garden right above the bunker and taken down with a single shot to the back of the head. So for the sake of accuracy, I’ve talked them into doing it that way.”

“Man, you are way too into that part.”

“Hey, did you know Carl Walther gave Hitler a solid-gold pistol for his birthday? In 1939, for his 50th. It was solid gold and had Ivory grips with Hitler’s initials on them. Hitler loved it so much he had it shipped to his home in Munich and kept it in his desk there.”

“So what happened to it?”

“An American G.I. swiped it. The Americans captured Munich on the day Hitler shot himself, and since no one knew where he was holed up at the time, the Americans thought he might be in his house in Munich. ’Course when they busted down the door, there was no one there. So they ransack the place and the squad leader pulls open the drawer and finds it. He brings it back to America with him – North Carolina, I think – and gifts it to a preacher friend of his. ’Course the preacher couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it, and soon after had it stolen after a break-in. Cut to a few years later, and it surfaces at a Cleveland gun show. It gets bought. Then bought again. Then again. At one point it gets shipped to a buyer in Australia. Years later, the Walther PP – that’s what it was – is shipped back to the states. Gets bought again. Last they heard, some buyer on the west coast had it.”     

“Gotcha.”

We didn’t even notice it when she came out, but there she is.

Dolph, who’s back was to the door, turns around. She sees the Walther and he’s quick to explain that it’s part a the costume.

She sags her shoulders and eyeballs us.

Dolph speaks first, “well Lianne, you gonna do the whole “What’re you boys doing out here?” routine when you know damn well what we’re doing, or do you want a smoke?”

“Yeah – give me one.”

From where I’m standing, I can see Tom ’n Mike’s baggy jeans tenting up as Lianne Thompson lights up and takes a drag. While those two are over there drooling, Dolph shoots the shit with our milfy librarian about what she’s doing later but all I can hear is: while he’s having a smoke and she’s taking a drag, now they’re going to bed and my stomach is sick, it’s all in my head but she’s touching his chest now, he takes off her dress now…

I don’t even realize I’m bobbing around until they’re all staring at me.

Dance like no one’s watching. Then, when they are watching, dance harder.

“What’s he doing?”

“Probably hearing Mr. Brightside or something.”

The two of them turn back to face each other.

“So you want to be an actor?”

“I am related to Max Schreck. He played the vampire in the original Nosferatu-“

“I know who Max Schreck was.”

“Ever see Shadow of the Vampire?”

Tom an’ Mike’s cigs burned out a while ago, but they’re still sucking on the filters, trying to act like they’re still doing something. I got a ways to go on mine, though it’s cindering away down towards the last midget’s-handful of tobacco, but I throw it down and snub it out with my toe. Long after the smoke’s gone and the remaining nub’s gone cold, Mike pops his in and chews it like he’s chewing on a dry turd.

We step back in the library a few seconds after the first bell rings. Dolph hurries off to change outta the Waffen coat and throw the Walther in with the other junk before anyone notices it’s gone. I doubt that anyone would though.

After the last period – thank God for menopause! – Heh. I’ll have to write that one down – I’m shuffling across the foyer when I hear my name. She waves me over and I join Ms. Wet-Dreams-Are-Made-Of-These in the library. She hands me a folded slip of paper and tells me to run it to Dolph. The drama geeks have practice after school. Christ, a borderline cougar and she’s asking me to pass notes like a schoolgirl.

“Does Dolph, like, make you ovulate or something?”

She flips me off.

I squeeze through the heavy doors into the auditorium. Dolph and Leslie Dykes - in his high, screeching soprano that makes everyone mistake him for a girl – are busy chewing each other out:

“Schreck, quit trying to direct the play!”

Leslie turns to the drama teacher -

“He keeps trying to change the script!”

“I was just saying, supposedly, there’s this apocryphal story that supposedly Hitler said: “One day my spirit will rise from the grave and the whole world will know I was right.” I think it would be a dramatic touch to have Bob here say that before he pulls the trigger.”

Rob Brewer, the senior playing the part of Der Führer, stands next to him and nods his head.

“I like it.”

“Well I don’t.”

“How ’bout, “Everything dies baby, that’s a fact. Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”” 

“That’s Springsteen!”

“But for real though, and I’m being serious here, according to Heinz Linge, the last words he spoke to Adolf Hitler, moments before Hitler shot himself, was when Linge asked him what they should fight for now, and Hitler replied “for the coming man.”

Schreck bit his bottom lip and raised his brows.

“I – actually that might work.”

Leslie wandered off to find the guy playing the valet.

The drama teach slips a near-empty bottle of Cognac outta his jacket and empties the rest into his already almost all-booze mug of coffee. I tap Dolph on the shoulder and shove the booty call summons from his would-be slam piece into his palm, turn around and walk out. 

I walk past the music room and hear someone playing “Highschool Lover” from the Virgin Suicides and I stop to peek through the small window. It’s the music teacher, with his neckbeard and thick-framed glasses, his cig smoldering out in the ashtray placed on the top board of the piano.