The Day Fashion Met Silent Green - Brandon Christopher (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📗

Seventh grade was a son of a bitch. Not exactly the numerical grade itself but the realization that it was Junior High—that I was in Junior High. I was now in that strange frontier of dating and hair mousse and social cliques, and the harbinger of high school itself: fashion. Fashion, what a son of a bitch.
Thirteen was an age when you needed privacy, room for personal expression, social growth, new style. What a 13-year-old really needed was his own bedroom to allow this strange, new season to fully blossom. But when you’re the middle child of a middle-class family of five in a small, three-bedroom house, you had to make due with what you had. What I had was a dad with a new power drill, three cans of Miller High Life and a Saturday without any sports on the TV.
“Ah, son of a bitch!” My dad wailed as he pulled the power drill from my bedroom ceiling and inspected the screwdriver bit. “This dumb son of a bitch isn’t doing anything!”
“Give it to me,” my older brother replied, taking the drill from my dad’s hand while continuing to hold up the large particle board planted in the center of my room. The collar of my brother’s shirt was fashionably flipped up and the buttons at the front were fastened clear up to his neck. “Did you put this in correctly? Right here, this, right here,” Sean said as he snapped the plug firmly into the handle. “You have to make sure this is pushed in all the way.”
He handed the drill back up to my dad, who was standing one step high on a three-step ladder, and not fashionably clothed at all. As a matter of fact, my dad was the type of man who wore shorts that were so small and withered that his unmentionables dangled out from the bottom, as they were now. Everyone had learned to always keep their distance when dad was doing repairs on a ladder or stepstool.
He inspected the drill before lifting it over his head and planting two screws into the ceiling, trapping the top of the particle board in place at the center of the room. No one wanted to watch, but all three of us saw his unmentionables jiggle as the drill shook his body.
“See, who needs their own bedroom when you got a new wall?” He said as he stepped down and cracked open his second can of beer. He took a long sip and studied the finished job, apparently very proud of himself. He and my older brother had just successfully turned one small bedroom, which my little brother and I had always shared, into two tiny bedrooms in the span of forty minutes.
My little brother and I were watching eagerly from the door, sitting Indian-style on the carpeted hall floor just outside the room. It wasn’t quite what I had expected when I heard him mutter the phrase, “Build an addition to the house for you,” over dinner the previous night, but it was definitely a beginning. I did indeed now have my own bedroom.
“You guys did a real son of a bitch job,” I told them.
“Hey, watch your goddamned mouth!” My dad replied. “This thing can come down as fast as it went up!”
“No, no, no, I meant it was good,” I explained, “a good son of a bitch job. I like it. Colin, don’t you think it’s good?” I looked at my little brother’s enormous smile before my dad interjected.
“What the hell did I just say? Watch your goddamned lip, flakes!” My parents had called me ‘flakes’ ever since I could remember, because Brandon had turned into Bran sometime around the toddler stage, and Bran was associated with flakes, like the cereal bran flakes. I was a cereal, and not even a good one. I was nicknamed after a meal that made you shit.
After they situated our mattresses against both sides of the particle board partition, Sean and my dad collected their tools and empty cans and left our bedroom in an argument about my older brother borrowing some money to buy an old Porsche. The last thing I heard was my dad saying, “What do you need a piece of shit like that for when the Corolla runs like a top?” My brother seemed to put up quite a fight in the kitchen about what an investment it would be and how he could drive my little brother and I to school in style, but when I heard the faucet turn on and the garbage disposal erupt, I knew the argument was over. Sean didn’t. He refused to admit defeat just yet and continued to express his need for German speed and handling even louder.
“If you stop putting so much of that crap in your hair, you could save a fortune and buy it yourself,” my dad explained after turning off the water.
“Mom buys my mousse!” Sean replied, “I have been saving!”
I sat on my bed in my new bedroom and listened to them bicker back and forth about hair products and Porsches for several minutes. I realized that my older brother had some serious conviction toward his style. I had never heard an 18-year-old defend his right for personal freedom like he did, not even on TV. This was the type of dedication to fashion that I should have, I thought to myself. Now that seventh grade was here, I should be claiming my right to some form of style and defending it with hellfire. I should be my own Rosa Parks, and the front of my bus should be bitchen clothes and a new hairstyle. “Bitchen,” I whispered to myself. Bitchen would be my new fashionable word.
The argument ended when I heard my brother’s bedroom door slam and my dad yell, “And don’t blast that goddamned Durango-Rango music either!” And seconds later, the Durango-Rango music, or what everyone else called Duran Duran, detonated from Sean’s bedroom.
With the bellowing soundtrack permeating my bedroom wall, I pulled all of my little brother’s clothes from the closet, folded them, and placed them on his bed in his side of the room. He looked at me quite concerned as to what was happening. I raised my shoulders and frowned, “I wish there was something I could do. The closet’s over there and you’re way over here. I folded them, though.”
As I helped him organize his folded stack of T-shirts and shorts into his drawers, he turned to me and said, “I think this being apart from one another is good for us.”
“I think it will give us a chance to grow, you know?’ I replied.
“Yes, I do know.”
“Well, I’ve got things to do,” I said and walked the eighteen or twenty inches to my side of the bedroom.
“That’s rich,” he replied.
Over the next two hours I constructed a make-shift bedroom door from three pieces of cardboard duct-taped together with a piece of string for a handle, as well as situated all of my ‘fashionable’ clothes onto hangers and hung them in the closet. The construction of the door took one hour and fifty-six minutes, mostly because I decided to draw a life-size Viking warrior with a battle axe on the outside, proclaiming DO NOT ENTER to all that approached. The hanging of the clothes took approximately four minutes. You would be surprised at how quick an army jacket, a camouflage T-shirt, and two pairs of pants were to put on hangers.
I sat on my bed and pondered the amount of girls I would be able to ask out on a date with an army jacket and a camouflage shirt. Not too many, I surmised. Not too many at all.
But as 5:00 rolled around, my mother not only prepared her infamous meatloaf for the family, but she relayed the news that would flicker Sean’s cool meter in high school, and hopefully mine in Junior High.
“Do you guys know who Rick Springfield is?” Mom asked the table as she cut slabs out of the mound of wet beef and divvied them out to us.
Sean’s eyes lit up instantly. “Rick Springfield? Yea, I know who he is! I know every word to Jessie’s Girl! I lost my virgi-” He stopped himself short of finishing. “Yea, why?”
“He’s playing at the Amphitheatre tomorrow night and there was a bunch of extra tickets left over, so I brought home enough for all of us to go,” my mom replied. “They’re 2nd row, too. Right in front.”
“Holy shit!” Sean stood and announced.
“Watch your mouth at the dinner table, Seany!” My dad exclaimed.
“But, dad, we got tickets to Rick Springfield!” Sean replied.
“I don’t care if the good Lord is singing at Universal tomorrow tonight! You don’t watch your mouth, you aren’t going anywhere!” Dad barked.
“I like Born in the USA,” I commented. “I think he’s a Vietnam vet, too.”
“I don’t think that’s Rick Springfield,” my mom said as she sat down and poured herself a glass of wine. “But you might like him anyway.”
“That’s Bruce Springsteen!” Sean started drumming his index fingers against the wood table and then began singing. “Rick Springfield does I- did- ev-ery-thing- for you….you did nothing for me, I- did-ev-ery-thing- for you…you did nothing for me!”
“Just eat your goddamned meatloaf, would you, please?” My dad asked my older brother, “And quit drumming the table or I’ll Jessie’s Girl you.”
Colin and I weren’t quite sure what dad meant by that, but Sean seemed to. He quieted down and sped through his meal in a matter of minutes, nodding his head to some silent song the whole time.
“Flakes, are you ready for your first concert?” Mom asked me.
“You know, I am,” I replied, “but I think I’d be more prepared if I had some new clothes to wear. It seems that all the clothes that I curr-”
“What do you need new clothes for?” My dad chimed in with a mouthful of mashed potatoes, “You wear a uniform to school everyday! You got another year in a uniform if you keep your grades up.”
“I thought you liked wearing your uniform, honey?” Mom asked. “You told us it defined you.”
“Yea, but a smart, new blazer or a leather jacket would be just what-”
“Honey, just wear something from your father’s closet tomorrow night,” my mom explained to me with a compassionate smile. “You’ll find something nice in there.”
“Can I wear mousse in my hair then?” I asked her. She looked over at my dad, who in turn looked over at Sean with a grimace, as if to say Look what you started with that talk of fashion!
“Why don’t you let me style your hair tomorrow night, okay?” Mom replied. “I’ll make you look real handsome.”
“Well…okay, but I’m picking out my clothes,” I demanded. “You guys aren’t going to believe what I’m going to do with that closet of dad’s. You’ll rue the day