Rats Saw God Read Free Page A

was the son of one of the space shuttle pilots. Ours was a world of sports cars, designer clothes, fifteen-acre malls, million-dollar homes, cruising Westheimer on weekends, Galveston beach homes, and private tennis coaches.
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    My freshman year came and went, as freshman years tend to do, like a half-assed nightmare whose chief horror was endless, brain-rotting boredom rather than the expected Blackboard Jungle scenes in which brutal, leather-jacketed seniors would smash me against my locker and terrorize me:
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    â€œHey, Rocco, I smell somethin’ bad. Waddya think it is?”
    â€œI dunno, Paulie, dead fish maybe?”
    â€œNah, dis fish ain’t dead—but he’s gonna be!”
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    Nope. Nothing that exciting. I almost wish there had been.
    Grace High School, “Home of the Buccaneers,” dwarfed the junior high I’d attended the year before in Cocoa Beach. The school, only eight years old, still shined: no graffiti, no evidence of wear and tear. Freshmen were herded to the large gym to pick up schedules. Inside, booths had been constructed by every group conceivable, from the mundane (student council, glee club, future teachers) to the exotic (fantasy war gamers, Russian club, falconry club). There must have been fifty organizations there competing for freshman patronage.
    The biggest relief upon receiving my schedule was knowing I would no longer be skimmed into special “think tank” classes. Nope, there it was in carbon—regular English, algebra, biology, etc. I’d be just one of the white, upper-middle class, spoiled, straight-toothed, Mazda Miata–driving wannabes. I’d fit right in.
    As I made my way back through the throng (I had to begin searching for the English complex) I spotted perhaps the strangest of group structures—plywood supported by clumsily nailed two-by-fours arcing upward in nearly a 90-degree angle resembling an elongated U. At a table in front of this calamity of carpentry sat a refugee from a 1970s southern rock band—long straight blond hair, bangs hanging in front of his eyes, blue jean jacket, plain white T-shirt (not the designer Gap variety—the actual three-to-a-pack classic). He was, I noted with some surprise, reading. His book was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zenand the Art of Woodworking would have been a wiser selection, I thought.
    There was no prominently displayed sign demanding that we freshmen, like lemmings, line up to join whatever group this was.
    â€œIs this where I sign up for wood shop?” I asked.
    â€œSkate or Die,” the Gregg Allman clone said.
    â€œRight,” I said, as if his response made perfect sense to me. “So what is this thing, anyway?”
    Once questioned about the purpose of his structure, “Gregg” felt obliged to demonstrate. He kicked a skateboard out from under the table and began doing things on that ramp—flipping the board, spinning on his hand—I had only seen executed in rock videos. Soon I found myself at the epicenter of a hemisphere of gaping fourteen-year-olds. They were all new recruits for Skate or Die (which was, I learned, a club—Grace’s purveyors of skateboard and diehard thrash-punk culture). Gregg, actually a fellow named Doug Chappell, had signed them up to replace alumni who had received their driver’s licenses over the summer.
    Although I never officially joined Skate or Die, on a social level I might as well have. Doug, the president and founder, became the nearest thing I had to a best friend, at least until I met Dub. Doug had formed Skate or Die because only recognized clubs got their pictures in the yearbook, and the school constitution required every officially recognized club to include fifteen members. He wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about this had it not been for his annual five-hundred-dollar bet with his old man that Doug