The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

36.

Only the die-hards remained. The true friends. The family. The real alcoholics. You know who you’re are. This is what we’re here for.

“Here is a thing to do,” said the old-looking guy in the Bullitt costume. “Here is what we ask of you.”

Acoustic guitar chords came from somewhere. Something simple. C-B-A minor-G. A child could do it. Even Dick could do it.

A caveman came down from the stairs into the living room, strumming a guitar. Those who had seen this before began to clap out a beat. The caveman wore a leopard-print skirt slung over one shoulder. Silly Putty formed a proto-human brow.

The caveman sang, in a deep, flat voice.

In the age of dinosaurs and wooly mammoths

There were no Arthur Millers or David Mamets

But the cavemen had fun the only way they could

By predicting the films of Hollywood

Half the crowd joined in on the chorus:

Come with me now

To a land before time

Before the Nintendo,

Phat beats or dope rhymes

Every day you knew

An allosaur could eat you

But in the meantime you watched
The Caveman Theatre

The crowd applauded the caveman back upstairs. Dick felt like an alien, a savage in the civilized world, observing rituals he could not understand. Bullitt took the floor again.

“Who will heed the call? Who here has the fortitude to put his or her talents on display for all to see? Who will tread the boards of the Caveman Theatre?”

Fifteen hands shot up. Bullitt pointed at five of the volunteers, three volleyball girls and two guys: one a Trent Reznor lookalike dressed as one of those twins from GI Joe, the other Dr. Leif Wunderbar. Chet.

“To the dressing rooms!” shouted Bullitt. “The show goes on in ten minutes!”

Chet, the GI Joe and the volleyball girls all went upstairs. Dick watched Chet go, fully assimilated now into this new world.

************

“Where’s Dave?” Avery asked the caveman, the third roommate, Owen Bean.

“I don’t know,” said Owen, removing the Silly Putty from his forehead. “I think he went in your room with some girl.”

“The hell,” said Avery.

“I mean I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Avery walked through the kitchen to his bedroom, past the table of empty liquor handles, spilled vodka dripping off the edges. Dave was in the bedroom, leaning back in Avery’s desk chair, staring at the ceiling.

“Dave?”

Dave leaned forward, the chair creaking. His feet thumped to the floor.

“What are you doing in here?”

Dave stood up. “Nothing. Just needed a break for a minute.”

Avery saw the green footprints on the wall. “What are those?”

Dave looked at the footprints as if seeing them for the first time. “No idea.”

Avery wanted to get pissed off but couldn’t find a reason to. So what if Dave was in his room. Avery wasn’t his dad. “Caveman Theatre’s starting. We need you to judge.”

“Yeah.” Avery held the door open for Dave to leave. He closed the door behind them. “Who’s playing?

“The two prospectives. Three of the volleyball girls.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Wanted to get the Green Giant, but she disappeared.”

“You got one of the GI Joe twins?”

“Yeah.”

“You get the right one?”

“I think so.”

“Doesn’t really matter, right?”

“Not really.”

Avery and Dave went back into the living room to address the crowd. “While the contestants are preparing, let me explain to the newbies how Caveman Theatre works. Our five actors will each perform a monologue from a well-known film using only caveman grunts. No modern vocalizing or gestures will be allowed; our resident anthropology expert Owen Bean will judge how well they adhere to this requirement. Taddlington Taft here, who has no knowledge of which films the participants will be performing, will have to name the movies being acted out. And I will be judging on overall moxie and charisma. After the individual events, the actors will perform a scene together. Same rule apply, and the caveman or woman who does the best in both the individual and group events will be crowned champion.”

Dave turned on the stereo to entertain the crowd while they waited for the actors. The Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” started playing, Everybody in the living room sang along. They were toddlers when this album came out, but Dave had never met anyone under the age of 30 who didn’t know every word to every song of Violent Femmes. He’d bring up Fear of Music or Sandanista! to these same people and get nothing but blank stares; he’d mention the Beatles and the response would be “Yeah, I like that LSD song,” but all you had to do was say “Why can’t I get just one” and you’d set off a group singalong. Why the Violent Femmes weren’t the biggest band in the world, Dave had no idea. It was like hearing their first album was a rite of passage that every fifteen-year-old had to go through, or else they couldn’t graduate into adulthood. Being a teenager was like one of the old Sierra adventure games, like Gold Rush!: you couldn’t move on until you had accumulated enough points. You got a teenager point for listening to Violent Femmes. It was a codified experience, just like all the little things you had to do in order to leave Brooklyn in Gold Rush! You heard “Add It Up” or “Blister in the Sun” on the radio or in a movie or in an older friend’s car. You found out the name of the band. You got the album as one of your twelve for a penny from Columbia House. “Add It Up” thrilled Dave the first time he heard it, at two in the morning on 99x, the “alternative” radio station in Atlanta. He had never heard anything like Gordon Gano’s sardonic yet sincere, keening voice, ranting and whispering and spitting nonsense syllables over driving acoustic bass guitar: it sounded simple but insane, like an uncensored communiqué from a teenage brain. The DJ didn’t drop out the “fuck” in “Why can’t I get just one fuck?” and that was vitally important. The song was what everything always felt like, always.

Now “Add It Up” and “Blister in the Sun” and the rest of the album were part of the common language of the college student—they didn’t mean anything by themselves, just like letters don’t mean anything if you don’t know how to read. You have to know what they stand for.

When Gano whispered the last verse of the song, everybody dropped their voices and whispered it along with him. It was like they had rehearsed it. All Dave could hear was this hissing sound, like air escaping a tire. Dave had heard the same thing in dozens of bars, every time a DJ played “Blister in the Sun.” It was a hymn, is what it was, everyone joining their voices to worship the one thing they all believed in: their own childhood. Dave estimated that a solid seventy percent of his conversations at UNWG had consisted mainly of rattling off lists of pop-culture minutiae: Transformers or GI Joe or Masters of the Universe characters, Simpsons quotes, favorite albums, favorite songs, favorite movies. This was how one made friends, how one discovered which people were enough like one to be worth spending time with.

Dave always thought that, when Gano whines “we’re driving” in “Gimme the Car,” he was intentionally making it sound like “vagina.”

The five actors came down the stairs in their caveman costumes, which were just like Owen’s costume, and which at least on the volleyball girls left very little to the imagination. “We’re driving,” indeed. Dave cut the stereo, and the five actors took their positions in the front of the living room. Dave and Owen sat on the Official Caveman Theatre Judging Couch.

Avery help up a cowboy hat filled with slips of paper. “In this hat are the names of movies that our intrepid Neanderthal actors will have to peform for you. Each will draw a film randomly, and then act it out. Chet, you’re first.”

*************

Chet reached in the hat and chose a name: Clash of the Titans. Of all the movies whose names could have been in the hat, perhaps only Star Wars would have been easier. Chet had watched Clash of the Titans almost monthly as a child, had even dressed up as Harry Hamlin’s Perseus for one Halloween. His greatest regret from childhood was trading his massive Kraken action figure to Ron Dawkins for a Dukes of Hazzard General Lee model; the car was long gone, but the memory of that Kraken never left him. It had come to symbolize every mistake, every lost opportunity, every bad decision Chet had ever made. It was a dark pit at the center of his memory, dragging everything down around it.

Chet stepped forward, into the center of the audience in the living room. He crouched down and folded his body into a ball. He held that position for a moment, then rose out of it, pushing upwards as if swimming toward the surface. At his full height, he swung his arms around and bellowed. “Rrrragghhh! Mmmmrrrrrooooggghhhh!”

Chet stepped to the side to indicate that he was now a new character. He curved his left arm, as if carrying something round in the crook. He reached into the space created by his arm and mimed pulling out a heavy object. “Hissss!” he said. He raised his arm, holding up the invisible object. “Hissss!”

Back to the first character. Chet bellowed and flailed his arms. “Mmmrraaaghhhh!”

He held up the object. “Hissss!”

He swung his arms, but more slowly now. He stopped bellowing. He moved slower and slower, then not at all. He stood there, mouth open and frozen, arms at right angles.

Then he moved his weight off his right leg and collapsed to the floor, a pile of jumbled limbs.

© 2006 Gardner Linn