Free Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn Page B

littered the house with change and crumpled bills. When he came home from the store at night, he’d fling what was in his pockets on shelves and tables as if he were ridding himself of built-up poisons, not seeming to notice when his property vanished What disturbed him was spending money, buying things; misplacing money was just a part of life.
    “You sure you want to go this route?” said Willy, counting the fives. I felt patronized, insulted. He’d done quite well as a drunk—he’d won a movie role.
    “Buy me some booze or I’ll get it from Fred Hurley.” Fred was our other town drunk, Willy’s rival, younger and less picturesque by half, but possibly more authentic. Not an actor.
    “You’ll get it from me,” said Willy. “I’m your guy. How much do you want?”
    “Enough to knock me out.”
    “This isn’t a suicide thing, I hope.”
    “Just buy it.”
    I came back three days later, as directed, and foundmy connection unconscious on the couch. His head hung down over the edge and grazed the floor and the blood pooled in his face had turned it purple, swelling his lips into froggy blobs. I rifled cupboards and yanked out drawers, freeing clouds of midges and flying ants. I couldn’t find my vodka.
    “Out. Get away!” I heard Willy shout behind me.
    I turned, harassed by the insects in my face.
    “It’s you,” Willy said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Where’s my liquor?”
    “Never give an alcoholic money, kid.”
    I made him sit up, then searched his dungarees. He held his arms in the air and didn’t protest. But besides some empty food stamp booklets, all I found was his actor’s union card, laminated in plastic. What a fake.

    I soon discovered that marijuana was easier to get. I followed a smell to the woods behind the Lions Park and found a group of older girls in tube tops passing a stone pipe and gossiping. They were comparing the size and shape of the school’s top athletes’ penises. When I joined the girls the next day the topic was “assne”—who had pimples on their butts. In return for a couple of hits off the pipe, I sold out half the boys’ locker room. It was something that I’d been waiting to do, I realized.
    The girl I grew closest to was Donna Prine, a redhead with freckles the color of new pennies. She lived alone with her famous father, the only Shandstrom Falls celebrityother than Willy Lindt. His twice-weekly column for the St. Paul paper was syndicated throughout the northern plains and took as its theme the decline of basic values. I wasn’t a fan of his politics, but I admired his wordplay. He called Hollywood actors “movie scars,” abortions “vacwombs,” politicians “kleptocrats,” and people on welfare “food tramps.” Due to his highly sensitive skin—the result, Donna said, of attending H-bomb tests during his 1950s army days—he seldom left the house. The one time I’d glimpsed him working in his yard, he’d worn a hooded sweatshirt and his face was smeared with white zinc oxide.
    One night I went with Donna in her Skylark to buy an ounce of pot. She blindfolded me before we left, wrapping my eyes in a sheer black nylon stocking fragrant with sweat and soap and baby oil. I inhaled deeply as we drove along. “Are you getting off on that?” said Donna. She took my left hand and sucked the middle finger, then guided it knuckle by knuckle through her zipper. “Just touch, don’t look,” she said. “That’s my rule, okay?”
    “Why can’t I look?”
    “I’m saving myself.”
    “For who?”
    “The area’s changing. New guys are moving in. Richer, more experienced. More eligible.”
    When Donna untied my blindfold we were parked in front of a lopsided white farmhouse whose windows were covered with sheets of plastic. The place was adump like many local farms, surrounded by weedy fields and rusting implements. Government programs paid farmers not to plant, so they’d taken to selling things instead: Amway detergent, gizmos that boosted gas