Dead End Gene Pool Read Online Free Page A

had human-skin lamp shades in his apartment, and he had laughed and nodded his head vigorously.
    “You mean the green ones with the circles and squares on them?”
    “That’s right! That’s right!” he had chortled, blowing smoke out through his nose while guzzling a highball of straight Coke.
    “But that’s gross !”
    “Yes! Yes! The color was unfortunate! Unfortunate!”
    After that revelation, I resolved to behave as badly as possible on George’s watch, and I warned my friends that if anything fishy were to happen to me, like my skin got removed for redecoration purposes, to tell the police the chauffeur did it.
    The stewardesses were demonstrating the crash position. Miss Bossy Beehive stopped and clucked her tongue at me. “ Sweet heart, where is that seat belt? I know this is all terribly exciting, but I want your belt securely fastened. Now, show me the position you need to be in—in case we CRASH. No, sugar pie, all the way down . . .” With a hook like Cassius Clay, she slammed my head down so hard I got a carpet burn from my dress. She turned to my brother, saying, “Buckle up, little man!” Strafing me with her concrete bosom, she leaned over and nipped in his waist so hard, his rib cage shot out over the metal fastener. She nodded to herself and moved on.
    “What d’you think it’ll be like?” I heard Will mumble in a nasal voice. His head was turned on his lap away from me.
    “What?”
    “To die.” He turned toward me, one eye on the retreating back of the stewardess.
    “Messy, I guess.”
    Will sat up and grinned. “I think it’s going to be pretty cool. I think we’ll make a gigantic fireball and everyone will see it, from California even, and we’ll get our names in the papers. Maybe they’ll even name a ride at Disneyland after us.”
    It didn’t sound so bad the way he envisioned it. In fact, it did sound sort of cool. Dammit, he would probably get to die first.

    Number One Son got everything before me. Even psychoanalysis.
    On Saturday mornings Will went to see Dr. Berman. He had started going after our father died. According to my grandfather, it was necessary for the son to talk to someone but not the daughter. When Will returned from his appointment, I sniffed him all over like a dog checking out a mate who’s been to the vet. “So?” I would demand. “Did he ask you any weird questions? Did he stick needles in you? Did you have to take down your pants?”
    “Naw. We just played games,” Will said.
    “Well what kind of games, idiot? Cards? Mouse Trap? Stratego? Does he have Creepy Crawlers?” After jigsaw puzzles, I was obsessed with Creepy Crawlers. It was a control freak’s dream set with a baking unit that could leave scars worthy of an acetylene torch. You put this liquid Plasti-Goop into molds carved with half reliefs of things like cockroaches and stinkbugs and silverfish, and scorpions and millipedes and bats, scratching the stuff into the antennae and spindly bug legs with a needle. Then you baked them in the cooker right there on the flammable shag carpeting of your bedroom floor.
    “I don’t know—just games!” Will didn’t recognize his hour with Dr. Berman as the spotlit, center-of-attention shower of love I knew it to be.
    I was burning up with curiosity; I needed to know what I was missing. But inevitably, my weekly joust for the dirt ended with no answers, and Will punching me in the stomach and declaring, “Dr. Berman says you’re acting out ’cause you’re jealous.” No shit.

    Anyway, that stewardess was wrong. I did not find the present situation exciting. Tragic would describe it more appropriately, because I was going to miss my eighth birthday party.
    My birthday was the single day out of the year when my mother behaved like a mother. In fact, she behaved like she was running for Mother of the Year, though that didn’t make up for the 364 other days when she either embarrassed me, ignored me, or was geographically elsewhere. I