Bubblegu- Adam Levin

I

INVITATION

JONBOAT SAY

GROWING UP, I’D HEARD, “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” a couple or three times a week from my father. The piehole thats shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though. It usually belonged to someone well outside shouting range—as frequently a radio or television newsman as a bested foe in a dinner table anecdote of everyday interpersonal victory—and never to my mother. She’d never been a cakeface. Not to my father or me at least. Nor had she ever used the saying herself, and, after she was gone, I wondered what, if anything, that might have meant. Except for when she’d hear it from my father’s mother, who’d put a bite behind the piehole that somehow made it sharper than whatever slur the cakeface was being used to euphemize, the saying seemed always to incite her to smile, yet I may have been too young to distinguish true amusement from motherly indulgence. I may have been too young to tell a smile from a smirk.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall my mother ever smirking.

But all of this to say that while Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason, by eventually having made it his catchphrase, popularized “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” it had been ours first. My family’s. We Magnets’. He learned it from me.

There used to be a couple of tetherball courts in the middle of the playground next door to our house, and one day, around the start of seventh grade, Blackie Buxman and I were facing off on one of them, playing best-of-nine for a soda and chips, when Jonboat, who’d moved to town a week earlier, declared his intention to challenge the winner. Buxman wouldn’t rob liquor stores for years yet. He was, at that time, our school’s starting pitcher and basketball center. I lacked strength and was average of stature. My competitive streak was the width of a noodle. Having grown up so close to the playground, however, I dominated foursquare and tetherball the both. Blackie must have forgotten, or maybe never known. When I beat him five-zip, he evinced disbelief. He said, “No way,” then spoke to me rudely. “Go assfuck a swingset, you psycho,” he said.

That cut me a little, but I came back fast. I said, “Fetch me my cold Cherry Coke and Pringles. In the meantime, though, shut your piehole, cakeface.”

Jonboat laughed.

The crowd around the court took a couple steps back, alarmed and confused. I possessed at that time a fair-size, however provisional measure of blacksheepish cool, and so was someone who’d have normally been able to get away with wising off to Buxman in response to a slight—it would have looked like we were riffing—but Jonboat’s laughter bent the social calculus. No one quite understood where he fit yet. Girls seemed to like him. He was certainly big. His father was Jon “Jon-Jon” Jason, and his granddad Hubert “All Hell” Pellmore. Nevertheless, Jonboat was the new kid; the new, rich, blond kid. He didn’t have friends, or we were, all of us, his friends—none of us were sure. For all we knew, Jonboat was too blond and rich—was that a thing? It seemed like it could be and it seemed like it couldn’t. Did he have the right to laugh at Blackie’s expense, though? And if he had the right to laugh at Blackie’s expense, did I have the right to get credit for his laughter? Did Blackie Buxman have to save face?

Blackie thought he did. So it was Jonboat or me. Someone had to hurt. I was the easy choice, and Blackie liked it easy, simple as that. He stepped in my direction. Jonboat shoved him sideways. Blackie reached for Jonboat, and Jonboat smashed his nose.

“You’ll pay,” Blackie said.

“Shut your piehole-cakeface, gaylord,” said Jonboat.

Blackie loped home without buying me snacks. Jonboat roundly defeated me at tetherball—five to three—and took me out for pizza. We were friendly for a while, though not really friends til a few months later when he beat me up at school.

* * *

After spending a semester using “piehole” as a modifier and pushing back the comma so the saying could abide the direct address “gaylord,” Jonboat—who’d by then taken Blackie’s starting spot at center, gotten to third with a sitcom ingénue at a party at the White House over winter break, and become, hands down, the goldenest goldenboy in Wheelatine Township, perhaps in all the greater Chicagolandarea—realized, I think, that even as “Shut your piehole-cakeface, gaylord” had entered the everyday parlance of our school, it was ineradicably branded Jonboat,