Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris Read Free Book Online

earlier?
The immediate goal was to save my friend, and so I claimed to have essentially thrown myself in the path of Thad’s fast-moving rock.
“What the hell was he throwing rocks for?” my father asked. “What the hell was he throwing them at?”
Mrs. Pope frowned, implying that such language was not welcome in the rumpus room.
“I mean, Jesus Christ, the guy’s got to be a complete idiot.”
Thad swore he hadn’t been aiming at anything, and I backed him up, saying it was just one of those things we all did. “Like in Vietnam or whatever. It was just friendly fire.”
My father asked what the hell I knew about Vietnam, and again Thad’s mother winced, saying that boys picked up a lot of this talk by watching the news.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father said.
“What my wife meant . . . ,” Mr. Pope said.
“Aww, baloney.”
The trio of Popes exchanged meaningful glances, holding what amounted to a brief, telepathic powwow. “This man crazy,” the smoke signals read. “Make heap big trouble for others.”
I looked at my father, a man in dirty shorts who drank his beer from the can rather than pouring it into his tumbler, and I thought, You don’t belong here. More precisely, I decided that he was the reason I didn’t belong. The hokey Greek phrases, the how-to lectures on mixing your own concrete, the squabble over who would pay the stupid dentist bill — little by little, it had all seeped into my bloodstream, robbing me of my natural ability to please others. For as long as I could remember, he’d been telling us that it didn’t matter what other people thought: their judgment was crap, a waste of time, baloney. But it did matter, especially when those people were these people.
“Well,” Mr. Pope said, “I can see that this is going nowhere.”
My father laughed. “Yeah, you got that right.” It sounded like a parting sentence, but rather than standing to leave, he leaned back in the sofa and rested his beer can upon his stomach. “We’re all going nowhere.”
At this point I’m fairly sure that Thad and I were envisioning the same grim scenario. While the rest of the world moved on, my increasingly filthy and bearded father would continue to occupy the rumpus-room sofa. Christmas would come, friends would visit, and the Popes would bitterly direct them toward the easy chairs. “Just ignore him,” they’d say. “He’ll go home sooner or later.”
In the end, they agreed to pay for half of the root canal, not because they thought it was fair but because they wanted us out of their house.
Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy. On leaving Thad’s house, I decided that ours would probably be the latter. We’d start off grousing about my father, and then, little by little, we’d move on to the hundreds of other things and people that got on our nerves. “You hate olives,” I imagined him saying. “I hate them, too!”
As it turned out, the one thing we both hated was me. Rather, I hated me. Thad couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm. The day after the meeting, I approached him in the lunchroom, where he sat at his regular table, surrounded by his regular friends. “Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry about that stuff with my dad.” I’d worked up a whole long speech, complete with imitations, but by the time I finished my mission statement, he’d turned to resume his conversation with Doug Middleton. Our perjured testimony, my father’s behavior, even the rock throwing: I was so far beneath him that it hadn’t even registered.
Poof.
The socialites of E. C. Brooks shone even brighter in junior high, but come tenth grade, things began to change. Desegregation drove a lot of the popular people into private schools, and those who remained seemed silly and archaic, deposed royalty from a country the