Johnny Chesthair (The He-Man Women Haters Club Book 1) Read online

  “Five dollars?” I gasped.

  Wolfbang smiled at me, palm extended.

  “Well, I don’t feel that bad,” I said, and bolted out the door. As soon as I was outside, Jerome caught up to me.

  “You just don’t know him yet,” he said. “You’re really going to get to like him.”

  “He reminds you of me, Jerome? He reminds you of me?”

  “Well,” Jerome said, “he really, really likes cars, and…he claims he hates girls…well, hates pretty much everybody, but…”

  The two of us were walking quickly down the sidewalk when the V.R. manager called to us from the front door half a block away. “Hey, you forgot something.” As we turned back to look, the man revved up and gave Wolfie on Wheels a mighty shove.

  The kid was actually grinning as he tooled down the street at about sixty miles per hour. It took everything Jerome and I had to stop him when he reached us, since he made no effort to slow himself down.

  “First off,” Wolf said, “is this club handicap accessible? Second, what’s in it for me? Is there anything special about you that I should want to join up? And about the name, He-Man Women Haters Club, is that literally, like we have to go out and actively hate ’em, or just kind of a philosophical hate?”

  The thing about Wolfbang is, because of who he was, and because of who I wasn’t, I couldn’t handle him like I should have. I kept looking to Jerome like Wolfbang spoke some screwy foreign language and I needed an interpreter.

  “Maybe if you got one of those chairs with a motor,” Jerome said. “Maybe then he couldn’t shove you like that.”

  “I got one,” Wolfbang said, “but I like to be pushed.”

  I didn’t even wait to be told. I circled back and started pushing Wolf on Wheels toward Lars’s Garage.

  I couldn’t even believe myself. What a dink.

  “That’s the boy,” he said smugly.

  That’s what I needed. I smacked him across the back of the head.

  The Wolf howled; Jerome gasped. Order was restored. I felt better.

  For a few minutes.

  “So, what, do you guys get some kind of government funding for having handicapped membership, is that what you wanted me for?”

  He was like that the whole way back to the garage.

  “I’m not cut out for this, Jerome,” I whispered after I’d pushed the Wolf a few yards ahead of us. “This whole handicap thing. I don’t think I can deal—”

  “Hey, it’s my legs that don’t work, the ears are fine. I can hear you back there.”

  “So what,” I yelled, exasperated. “So you can hear me. So are you mad now? Are you offended, or what? Y’know, Wolfie, if I were you, I’d peel right on out of here. You don’t have to put up with this kind of—”

  He spun on me, slick, getting his two little front wheels up in the air and holding them there, a wheelie, for several seconds. Then he slowly cruised toward me and we faced each other there on the sidewalk, OK Corral-style.

  “I don’t think I could be in this weenie club anyway, with you being the boss. You are so afraid of me it’s funny. I think I might laugh, even.”

  I turned to Jerome, and pointed at Wolf. “This is what I’m talking about. This guy needs disciplining. I mean, he needs it, but how am I supposed to give him the beating he deserves with—”

  He ran into the side of my leg with the sharp metal foot plate on the front of the chair.

  “Oww!” I yelled. “That does it. Go on home, ya little freak.”

  He reached up—somehow his arms could stretch way higher than you’d think—and grabbed me by the collar of my jacket. Before I could react I was down on the sidewalk, down hard, and thrashing around with him. It was like a nightmare I couldn’t have dreamed because it never would have occurred to me.

  “This is so embarrassing,” I said, talking even as we wrestled. The two of us were locked together and rolling, like the guys who wrestle alligators, rolling over and over and over until we plunked into the gutter, neither one of us on the top, neither one of us on the bottom.

  “Jerroooome,” I called, Wolf’s fist pressing into my throat, squeezing my voice into something clownish.

  “Don’t cry to Jerome,” Wolf answered, in the same voice, for the same reason. “You want me off, you get me off.”

  “All right then, Wolfie, I don’t want to get tough with someone like you, but I’ll do it to get you out of here.”

  “Hah” was all he had to say.

  I went to work. But nothing much happened. First I tried squeezing his neck, but it tightened, even thickened in my hands. I rolled him over, worked him into a headlock. He pulled out of it like a turtle sucking into its shell. When he was behind me, he sank a kidney punch.

  “Oh boy,” I huffed. “You’re in deep now.” I was on my knees, and stayed there, I guess because my opponent was sitting. Jerome had drifted twenty feet down the sidewalk, pretending not to know us.

  I locked the Wolf into my patented bear hug. He locked me likewise in his.

  It would make sense that guys with no use of their legs would develop pretty good upper body strength. But you never really know until you’re squeezed by one.

  First my breathing got very shallow. Then I saw those spots like when a camera flash goes off right in your face.

  Then I woke up. I looked over to see Jerome trying to help Wolf into his chair, Wolf slapping Jerome’s bony hand away, then swinging himself up into the chair.

  “This is so embarrassing,” I said again.

  “Hah,” Wolf said again.

  I sat upright. Stayed there for a few seconds. “Fine, Wolfbang,” I said. “But it’s still my club. Got it?”

  “You’re the head weenie,” he laughed.

  “Cool,” Jerome said. I had to look closely at him to figure out whether he did honestly think it was cool. He did.

  When Jerome and I walked in the door to the garage, Lars was waiting for us just inside. There was a short step up to get inside the entrance, so I punched the button to lift the electric garage door so that Wolf could get in. Lars stepped back and shook his head as the new member rolled up.

  “Another one,” he said, shaking his head. “What are you doin’, neph, raiding the dumpster outside every other club?”

  5.

  Is It the Girl, or the Cookies?

  THIS IS ONE OF the Haunts. Comes back all the time. In this dream, Monica is in her Girl Scout uniform, and she’s selling cookies. Only she’s not like herself, she’s about eight feet tall. Behind her, lined up like a basketball team, are her friends, also Girl Scouts, also giants.

  “You want a cookie, Steven?” Monica says to me. She’s smiling, but I know better. She’s smiling at me the way a mean dog smiles when you walk too close to his fence.

  Fact is, I would love a cookie, in the dream. But I don’t want to tell her, because I’m afraid there’s a catch and I’m going to wind up looking like a dope in front of her gigantic wicked Girl Scout friends. So I say no way, I hate Girl Scout cookies, everybody knows that.

  “Are you sure?” Monica coos. “I have somoas here, Steven. I have the legendary chocolate mints, and I have tagalongs.”

  Holy Smokes, the tagalongs. How can a guy be expected to resist the tagalongs? And free? Free tagalongs? It is never clearly stated, but it is definitely implied that I will not have to pay for these tagalongs. The box is already open, so, sure, they have to be free.

  Am I not merely human? A simple man.

  I reach for the cookie.

  She grows. Like Stretch Armstrong. She holds the cookie between two fingers, holds it out to me, and then shoots up into the sky like a human cherry picker. I jump—because, of course, now I want that tagalong more than I want air.

  But, of course, I won’t be reaching that tagalong anytime soon.

  “These cost money, you know,” she scolds me, while her friends laugh and yell things at me. “Selling cookies is the only way we can finance all the wonderful programs administered by t
he Girl Scouts of America, providing healthy and rewarding alternatives to today’s young women….” Blah blah blah.

  You would think I’d get the message. You’d be mistaken.

  “So,” I say, “do I get the cookie?”

  “You do not get the cookie. Buy your own box, ya grub.”

  “Fine,” I say—and this is where I realize it’s a dream, because I reach into my pocket and pull out a ten-dollar bill.

  Monica snags the money, looks into her bag, looks back at me.

  “Sorry,” she says. “We don’t have any more tagalongs. All that’s left are the shortbreads.”

  And that’s where I spring up in bed, sweating. The crappy shortbreads, can you believe it? What a Haunt. What a foul evil thing. Takes me hours to get back to sleep.

  The nerve of her anyway, showing up in my dream, puffing herself up so much huger than me. When really she’s only two inches taller than me.

  Two and a half, max.

  6.

  Sinkin’ Lincoln and Ling-Ling

  WOLFBANG, JEROME, AND MYSELF were just opening up for another promising day at the office, when Lars stopped us at the gate.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” my uncle said in a tone of no-admiration. “I don’t know how, but you found another one, didn’t ya?”

  “Another what?” I asked.

  “Another I-don’t-know-what,” he answered, “but there’s one more waiting for you back at the Lincoln. Says he’s here to join up. ‘Join up to what?’ I says. ‘Join up to the He-Man’s World,’ or Boys’ Room, or Pajama Party, or some such whatever, he says.” Lars took a long look around at the crew, staring particularly hard at Wolf, then even harder at little Jerome.

  The three official He-Man Women Haters Club members headed toward the rear of the shop to meet the guy who wanted to be number four. And there he was. Whatever he was.

  “He’s here to join up? Jerome,” I growled, “where are you getting these people? You placing ads? You building them in your basement? What?”

  “Hmmm. Ummm…I think maybe I remember posting just a little thing on the Internet…maybe.”

  “Arrrggghhh!” Wolf and I howled at the same time, our first agreement. “Computer fruiters!”

  “Cut it out, you guys,” Jerome protested. The new kid just sat motionless on the Lincoln’s trunk.

  “You never told me you were one of those, Jerome. This could constitute a breach of your club application. This is serious; I’m gonna have to rethink this whole thing now.”

  “Ya,” Wolfbang chimed.

  “Ya, Wolfbang and I are going to have to reconsider your application now to be in the He-Man’s club.”

  “You and Wolfbang? I’m the one who brought him in.”

  “Ya,” Wolf said. “But I didn’t even know you were one of them. If I knew, I would have figured this was one of them clubs, and I wouldn’t have joined anyhow.”

  “Ya, no kidding, Jerome,” I said. “It is very important that people don’t get the idea that we’re the wrong kind of club. We don’t want to be known for that.”

  “For what?” Jerome hollered.

  It’s a hard thing to define, exactly. I struggled. “For…you know what I mean.”

  “For the wrong stuff,” Wolf added.

  “Exactly. That’s what I mean. Wrongness is what we don’t want to be known for.”

  Jerome put his fists—which were actually like two fingers curled up into mini-fists—on his hips. He pulled down a face like nothing I’d seen on him yet, a face like anger. He went all red, his lips tightened, then spluttered as the voice came welling up from his abs.

  “Mmmmmmmorons!” he yelled. He turned and stomped toward the exit.

  I shrugged at Wolf, and he shrugged at me. Like we cared, right? We had new business to attend to. Wolf wheeled, and I stepped, a few feet closer to the new recruit. I was opening my mouth to begin the questioning when I heard the door slam. The same door through which we had first dragged the pummeled and frozen Jerome, back at the very birth of the HMWHC.

  The noise from the slam echoed through the spacious garage even after Lars yelled out, “Hey, don’t nobody slam my doors!”

  So, then, what? I stared at the new kid and I felt it gone already. What club? You could practically hear the crickets chirping, it was so dead in there. Rotten Jerome. He sucked the clubness right out the door with him.

  “What are you doing?” Wolf yelled as I ran toward the exit. “We got business. Serious business to attend to.”

  “Be right back,” I yelled as I flew out.

  “Don’t nobody slam my doors!” I heard from just the other side of the metal garage entrance.

  “Come back inside, Jerome.”

  Jerome kept right on stomping, making me follow and…sort of, not exactly, but something like, plead with him.

  “Come back in, Jerome.”

  “Get away from me, Steven. I’m going to join a computer fruiters club.”

  “Hey, you’ll hate yourself, man. I mean it. I’m just trying to save you here.”

  “Don’t save me.”

  I stopped following. I watched him walk down the sidewalk quickly, then a little more slowly, then slower. He tipped a look back over his shoulder, noticed I’d quit chasing, and stopped.

  “So, why should I?” he demanded, assuming his favorite fists-on-the-hips stance. “Huh, Steven? Why should I come back to a club where I’m a geek?”

  So, I had him. He wanted me to chase him. And he wanted to be begged. It wasn’t like he was turning down offers from a million other clubs.

  “No reason,” I said. “You’re right, never mind.” I started back toward the club.

  “Hey,” he called, starting after me. “Hey, hey you.” He caught up, started tapping me on the shoulder, but I kept on walking. “No, you were saying something back there. About how I should be coming back because you needed me—”

  “Dream on, backwash.”

  “You did, Steven, you said it. And it’s because you need somebody smart around because between you and Wolfie you combine for just about enough brains to run a hamster wheel.”

  My legs are longer than his, so as I picked up my pace he had to jog along to keep up. Very satisfying for me. “Well then, why don’t you and your big old computer geek brain just go back to quitting the club, like you were trying to do.”

  “Until you begged me to come back.”

  “You been sitting too close to the screen, cyber-boy.”

  We crossed through the doorway into Lars’s without interrupting our debate.

  “Oh ya, well, if you weren’t bringing me back, what were you doing behind me all that way down the street?”

  “I was chasing you away, is what.”

  “Hah, and you couldn’t even do that, could ya?” Jerome said as he took off his jacket and hung it on the nail right beside the life-size Snap-On Tools Girl poster.

  “Ahhh…” I ran aground. I not only ran out of things to say, I lost track of what I was trying to accomplish in the first place. Jerome was smart enough to notice.

  “And what about my sports idea, huh? You were going to help me get started with the sports thing, remember?”

  “Oh, ya.” I was in full backpedal now. “I’ve been thinking about some things. I want to come up with just the right…really soon, Jerome, I promise.” I wondered how long I’d be able to dodge this one. Truth, of course, was that there was no sport that would boost Jerome’s He-Man rating. He had a hockey player’s grit, tamped down into a chess-club body. “Hey,” I said abruptly. “Let’s not be rude. We’re ignoring our guest.”

  Smooth, no?

  “He’s in,” Wolfbang crowed, sitting beside the new guy, the two of them on the trunk of my Lincoln.

  “What do you mean, ‘He’s in’?” I said. “There’s only one guy around here with that kind of power.” I pointed with both my thumbs at ol’ Johnny Chesthair himself. “And get off of my car, both of ya.”

  The new guy got right off.
Wolf, just too cool, took his time sliding down into his waiting chair like an old movie cowboy and his loyal horsie.

  “How’d you get up there, anyway?” I asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you I could fly?” he said, wise wise wise.

  “Well, no, Wolf, you didn’t.”

  “So, just one more thing I got over you, I guess, huh?”

  Sigh.

  “You.” I turned on the prospective new He-Man. Figured I’d better start cracking the whip on somebody. “What’s your name?”

  “Ling-Ling.”

  “Listen,” I barked. “I will dissolve this club right now, if you boys don’t start getting in line. Now, what’s your real name?”

  “Ling-Ling.”

  “Cool,” Jerome said. “Like the panda.”

  “You ain’t Chinese,” I said.

  “I ain’t a bear, neither.”

  “Actually,” Jerome chatted away, “a panda isn’t a bear at all, it’s a—”

  “Shaddup,” I squawked over Wolfbang’s laughter.

  However, I realized, he did look like one. A panda. He was about eight feet tall and had an enormous head placed like a beach ball on top of his inflated parade float of a body. He had pale skin and dark circles around his eyes and he was a little ahead of the rest of us in the first-fuzzy-whiskers race, a light coat of cream-colored baby hair that spread evenly over his cheeks and chin, making him look like he was wearing felt on his face. He wore a black hat with fur earflaps, a white sweater, black parka, black jeans, and black boots. Apparently, he was happy to look like a panda.

  “Fine, but you want to tell me your real name anyway? Just so, as club brothers, we don’t have any secrets from each other?”

  “Nope. My real name is confidential, and will remain that way.”

  “Cool,” Jerome said again.

  “Weren’t you busy quitting or something?” I said to him.

  But in fact I agreed. Confidential. Secret. Mysterious. This was good club stuff.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  Ling-Ling moved to leave. As he brushed past me, I put out my hands to stop him. He was a solid big thing.

  “Okay, a trial membership. A special probationary…thing.”