A tale of a 12-year-old as he learns what it truly means to be an adult. (An excerpt from the novel, Dirty Little Altar Boy)
The Great Flight of the 12 Year-Old
There are but a few defining ages that truly create a man. There are the obvious, like 16, when you can drive a car, or 18, when you can vote and buy cigarettes and go to prison. And, of course, 21, when you can buy liquor and go into bars. But in the Christopher family, another gleaming moment on the road to manhood was the age of 12. At the age of 12, a child was no longer just a child; at age 12 a child became a man. At age 12, the Christopher boys learned the value of monetary gifts instead of toys.
Even though birthdays remained negotiable, as far as money was concerned, Christmases were a given. That Christmas of my twelfth year was the first of many upcoming joyous Christmases I would be celebrating; I had become eligible for the $50 bill gift from grandma. Being 12 meant that I was now ready to face the trials and tribulations that having money would offer. Besides, grandmas couldn’t shop for toys for shit. Wagons and die-cast metal cars were so passé.
I had never seen a $50 bill before, save for on the television, but it was exactly as I had pictured it. After opening the coveted envelope with my name handwritten across its front, safety-pinned to the Christmas tree, I quickly scanned over the shakily-written blessing and wishes on the inside of the card before pulling out the sharp, green bill from its paper sleeve. The corners were crisp and delicate from never being handled or folded before, and the green of the ink was rich and luscious, almost wet-looking. And the scent of the bill was one that could only be categorized as being wealthy.
I held the $50 bill in my two hands. I grazed my index finger over its ornate emblems and designs. I studied the intricacies of the ink webbing at its corners, the unknown president on its front. The bill had weight to it, both metaphorically and physically.
The possibilities were endless with all of this money. I stopped thinking of what I could buy and focused my attention on what I couldn’t buy with it, which, to a 12-year-old, wasn’t much. I could probably buy a slave with $50. I could buy a midget. I could buy one hundred candy bars, a ship. I could buy favors, influence, neighbors. I could probably buy a real gun and enough ammo to restart the Vietnam War, which, to a 12 year-old, was the only real war because it was the only one that had both Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris as its kung-fu-wielding veterans.
I continually thought about all the wonderful things that I could buy with my $50 until my dad thought about all of the wonderful things that I could learn from my $50. One of those nuggets of knowledge that I could learn from my $50 was that of interest, like the interest accumulated from saving it. And when I told my dad that I wasn’t interested in a bank account, and after he chuckled, he sternly replied, “It’ll be good for you.”
When my father said, “It’ll be good for you,” it meant, “This is what you will be doing.” His golden plan was to invest $35 of my $50 into a savings account, so that I could relish in the beauty of watching my money make money. But, keep in mind, this was also the same man that six years later would tell me to devote my future to a race horse instead of a good college.
So, it was that next Saturday that my father drove me down to Lincoln Savings in his brown Toyota pick-up, my $50 bill clutched in my sweaty fist inside the shallow pocket of my shorts.
He opened the large glass door of the building and we stood in the entrance and scanned the bank for the most trustworthy-looking teller. He nudged me on the shoulder and motioned to a woman smiling at us from her desk. I followed my dad to her shallow cubicle space, and we both sat down opposite the woman like two entrepreneurs with a great idea. It felt like such an official thing to be doing. I felt like a spy.
“Hello gentleman,” the twenty-something woman said to us both, “and what can I do for you today?” She wore a pastel purple blouse with a similarly-colored scarf around her neck but my eyes were glued to her big, red lips. Her lips looked like two beautiful slugs resting beside each other, both red and both glistening. I thought about what it would feel like to kiss her. I thought about how much of my $50 it would take to see her boobs. And then I thought about tying her satiny scarf around my forehead, and being in the jungles of ‘Nam with an M-16 assault rifle in my hands, a cigar chomped down between my teeth, barking orders at Private Dumb-Ass and Sergeant Numbnuts, throwing a grenade into a foxhole and then giving the rest of my battalion the thumbs-up after I saved all their asses…
My dad nudged me with his elbow, and I was back in the bank again. He loudly cleared his throat, implying it would be a good time for me to speak about this bank account matter. “Tell her, Brandon. Go on,” he encouraged me. “It’s your money, not hers.”
I looked up at him, and he glanced down to me, nodded. I turned to the woman to explain why we were there, but my dad nudged me again, harder this time, before I could get a word out. I looked back up at him, my mouth open, ready to talk, halted. He stared directly at me and nodded his head, and then he jutted his head toward the teller and nodded at her, as if I was confused and was supposed to follow his head to where it pointed. He nodded several times in her direction, almost violently, and then he glanced away, as if he was deep in thought and had been for hours. I turned back to the teller and tried to smile. This was harder than I thought it was going to be.
The teller smiled at me the way an angel would smile at an ugly orphan. She raised her ballpoint pen to her lower lip and rested it there, under that smile of hers, and she softly waited for me to say something. After a few seconds, she leaned across her desk toward me and spoke directly to my eyes, “And just what can I do for you, honey?”
With her still so close to my face, so intimately close that I could feel her warm breath against my nose and eyes and forehead, I leaned in closer to her and replied, “I’d like to open a savings account, please.”
“Okay, good,” she said and leaned back into her chair. She pulled some forms out from a drawer beside her legs, flipped over its first page, and rested the tip of her pen somewhere near the top. “So, a savings account, huh? You’re sure you don’t want to open a checking account?”
I was startled by the question. I didn’t really know the difference between checking and saving. It was just a bank account. I just wanted a bank account. I didn’t even want it, my dad did.
“Don’t do it!” My dad lowered his head into his neck and not-too-discreetly whispered to me. “Don’t!”
After glancing over at him and noticing his still-lowered face and rapidly-yet-sporadically shaking head, he, if there could be a way to whisper and yell at the same time, replied again, “Don’t do it! No!”
It took several seconds to break the strange hold that my dad’s weird reply-convulsion had on me, but I turned to the teller and said, “Just savings is fine.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off of my father, who was now nonchalantly gazing around the bank while patting his thin beard with his fingers. She looked back down at me and tried to smile, then looked back up at him and asked, “So, we’ll be opening a savings account for…?”
My dad continued to stroke his beard but now nodded his head in some form of rhythm, as if a jazzy tune had just entered his ears, way above our conversation. He peeked at me from the corners of his eyes and looked away, still nodding to the beat. I knew I had to step up to the bat.
“My name is Brandon Christopher.”
“Okay, good,” she replied, writing it down.
“David!” My dad blurted out while pretending to bend down and tie his shoe. “Brandon David!”
He had startled the female teller with his loud whispering recommendation to me, and again she glanced at him and then back down to me.
“Brandon David Christopher,” I clarified. “My full name. Sorry.”
“No problem at all,” she said and added in the additional name. “And how much will you be depositing today, Mr. Christopher?”
“Thirty five dollars,” I replied. “Thirty five American dollars.” Something from a movie made me say that, but she seemed to enjoy the clarification of currency.
“This is serious!” I heard from my left, but when I looked over to my father, where the words came from, he was casually tapping his chin with his index finger and staring at some transactions taking place at the stand-up tellers across the bank. “Savings account!”
There was a point in time after I heard “savings account” where I looked back at the teller to make sure that she had heard these words without origin as well. By her dumbstruck and open-mouthed gaze at my father, I knew she too had heard it, only she knew where it had originated from. She knew it was my father.
“Savings account!” My dad announced again to his left, to no one, from behind his fingers. “He wants a savings account! For college!” As his voice grew louder the tapping of his chin and beard grew more rapid, and more fingers were added.
Seconds had passed in silence, with only strange looks between the teller and me in lieu of communication. My dad continued to rattle off basic points of information at odd intervals of time, but he continued to act as if he wasn’t part of our conversation. He even started to pretend to cough as he muttered out sentence fragments of who I was, where I lived, why I wanted a savings account.
“He lives in Toluca Lake…good kid…young…”
“Twelve, just turned twelve…(cough)…”
“Catholic…”
With her eyes widened in pure awe and shock of this entire transaction, the teller reviewed the forms that she had just completed from my father’s ramblings and nodded her head. We had just successfully opened a savings account for me, without either me or the teller saying a word to each other in ten minutes.
“Okay, Mr. Christopher, I guess all that’s left is your first deposit of $35.”
I pulled my $50 from my pocket and rested it onto her desk; all of this, of course, under the careful eye of my father to my left, pretending to stare at the ceiling but watching everything taking place to his immediate right. I was afraid to say anything. I could only smile between clenched lips.
“Watch her,” my dad loudly whispered to me after shifting his gaze to the floor. “Fifteen dollars change. Get your receipt. Watch. Watch!”
It took his second announcement of “Watch” to break my eyes free from staring at him to actually watch the teller preparing my change from a drawer at her desk. The teller’s eyes were still attached to my father, and she blindly handed me back four $5 bills without even looking at me or the money.
“Um, I think you gave me too much back, miss,” I stuttered. I spread all four $5 bills in front of her, and it was at that moment that she blinked her eyes several times, stared down at the money upon her desk, glanced at me and smiled.
“Thanks.” She pulled one of the bills off the table and returned it to her drawer.
“Good,” my dad said and nodded his head. “Good boy.”
After documenting my first transaction, the teller handed me my little blue deposit book with its first set of numbers and her initials still wet on line #1. I looked down at my new deposit book and flipped through the fifty or sixty blank pages following the first page, the first page with $35 written on the first line. I imagined how my $35 could be magically transformed into a scribbled $35 memo inside a stupid, miniature book and be correct. Right then and there was when I no longer appreciated the future.
My dad’s whole demeanor changed upon standing. No longer was he the odd advice thrower with the tapping finger and faraway eyes. He became my dad again- charismatic, calm, sane. “Thanks for your help,” he calmly told the teller and shook her hand. “This is a great opportunity for my son.” All she could do was feign a smile and wave as we left.
“See, Brandon, not too bad, huh?” My dad asked me as we left the bank. “Don’t you feel like a grown-up now?”
I felt like I would never see that $35 again. I felt like this stupid blue bank book in my hand was a joke that adults played on kids to take their money. I felt like there were two kinds of people in this world: bank tellers and Christophers. I felt like I wanted to spend that remaining $15 as fast as I could before some other adult-type situation would take it away from me and offer some lady’s initials and a handwritten number in place of my cash.
“Yea, pop, I feel like a real grown-up now.”
Being twelve sucked. No one took toys away from you the weekend after Christmas when you were eleven. No one swiped your new G.I. Joe figures after a week and said, “Oh, do you like them? Well, here’s my signature and how much your toys are estimated at, and now we’re going to take them.” And what’s worse is I had a sneaky suspicion that what just happened to me would continue to happen to me every day from then on, from twelve to the rest of my days. The great flight of the 12 year-old. The transformation of boy into man. The big trick. The future was no place for a kid.
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