The Conductor

THE CONDUCTOR

The middle-aged secretary was staring at me from her desk, I could feel it. I took a deep breath and looked at the shining steel toes of my boots, thinking maybe she’d get bored of me and look at her typewriter or the fresh coffee stain on the front of her shirt. But she didn’t stop. I glanced up to cloudy sapphire eyes with red lines in the whites peering at me over pearlescent-rimmed reading glasses on a rainbow-beaded chain. The scrunched expression of dislike on her puffy face was palpable enough the moment I stepped into the offices, but now, she was just being rude.

My head jerked up and I sneered at her disdainfully. Her face twitched in response and her eyes planted themselves on the desktop. Her cheeks flushed red. I snorted and adjusted my position on the short difficult wood bench.

Barely the second Monday of the fiscal school year, and the Powers That Be already had me queued up for the shrink. Set one dumpster on fire your freshman year and they never forget! Geez.

I sat in the tiny waiting room that served the counselors offices in the administration building. These offices were right across the narrow hall from the nurses station and the Office of Administrations, whatever that meant anymore. Seems they just kept packing the kids in without a thought as to where and who and what anymore, accurate file keeping be damned.

This place was always so depressing. Grey and grey-green glossy paint, terrible foe-marbled mold-green tiles from the Fifties I guess, sound-buffering boards with a specific number of pinholes for the ceiling coupled with really old neon lights. Rust on the painted steel and long frosted bulbs flickering every few feet. The school board really went out of their way to make this place a definitive institution. Impressive.

Yeah, institution of learning. What a joke. Reminded me of jail or bedlam.

Building A1-AL, they called this particular structure of double decker cells posing as offices and to a lesser extent classrooms for the French course and the numerous Spanish classes. I still don’t know why the building was called A1-AL. None of the other buildings had such alpha-numeric names. Someone once posed that it was the first building of what used to be known as Abraham Lincoln High School. Except the school had never been called Abraham Lincoln. Just Pacific High. Another mystery of modern day high schooldom. Who cares.

I kicked out the heels of my boots, stretching my legs out straight, and crossed my ankles. Why on earth every single seat in any school had to be hard and uncomfortable–made out of injection-molded plastics that snapped like twigs under the influx of different weights and frames or out of what I could only figure was what happens when you deli-slice wood–why they had to be so cheap and blistering was beyond me.

However, the wooden ones left behind a bit of history; I would give these torture devices that much. Many students before me had left there mark on the bench I was planted on, and I couldn’t help tracing some of them. Kind of like cave paintings in a way. Graffiti dating back to probably the 1970's, if one looked hard enough for the ‘Disco Sucks’ or ‘Bay City Rollers O.K.!’ carved into the worn seat. Funny stuff. Bad jokes. Old prank phone numbers and disses. History unraveling in dead varnished wood.

Looking at the scrolled armrest, I could make out the name of this really nice guy from my freshman English class, carved almost Old English style into the dirty wood. Daniel Sanchez. Kid was a phenomenal comic artist. Could replicate James O’Barr’s stuff effortlessly. Did some amazing gear of his own too. Gave me a really nice copy of an Interview With The Vampire comic once. He was really nice, kinda cute too. Liked my stupid poetry and short stories, even wanted to ink some of my scenes into a book. His mom hated me though, thought I was gonna corrupt her son, full-on bible-beating Christian she was. Called me a heathen of Sodom or some such religious spunk. I only laughed.

I don’t know what happened to Danny, though. It seems he just disappeared one day, middle of sophomore year. I miss him. He understood me, in a way only certain teenagers understand other teenagers. Probably the only one who did in the entire school.

I traced my fingertip over the intricate D of Danny’s name a few times, absently smiling at it, thinking about his face and the ink-stains on his fingertips.   

The secretary, Miss Cathy I think her name was, sighed heavily and squirmed in her hard little desk chair. Greying old mare, she was rather bulbous in certain parts of her physique, like all the fat accumulated in only these places and nowhere else. Namely her hips and ass. She could’ve used this bench I sat on better than my bony little butt could’ve. I snickered a little to myself. She didn’t look up but her hands adjusted her bra beneath her arm through the thin K-Mart pink t-shirt that showed too much of her armpit hair. Her hand just manipulating the underwire around like no one was there at all. The look on her face said the bra was pinching her. The look on my face surely said ‘I’m gonna barf.’

Third Period late bell rang and I jumped a little, lifting my eyes to the wall clock, ticking steadily like a bomb up near the ceiling.

Annoying sound, school clock ticking. Like everyone else in the world who ever met the public school system, I swore that second hand would skip backwards and force time to last for an extra five to fifteen minutes of this dreariness every day. Slowly bleeding life and energy from every kid what ever stumbled across the thresholds of a campus.

Goddamnit! Why did they demand I attend these stupid things anymore?! I hadn’t even done anything destructive... well that they knew of, in almost a year! I sucked my teeth and furrowed my brow impatiently.

Apparently, the school counselor was new this year.

The old school counselor, Mrs. Trendle had retired, from what I heard, and was living with her fifteen cats somewhere on Catalina Island. She was a sweet old thing, reminded me of what my parents would’ve described as a School Marm or something like that. Always wore a long dress with a petty-coat beneath. Victorian smelling, little tawdry baubles for jewelry, clip-on earrings the size of my eyeball. Proper little woman. She never took me at face value though, like most did. She wasn’t real certain about me, but she didn’t think I was the spawn of Satan either.

Twice a week I saw Mrs. Trendle, one hour at a spell, for two and a half years. We mainly talked about British television that was on the local public broadcasting station, the railcar’s that used to run the length between our city and downtown Los Angeles, and animals. I gave her a pressed poppy flower one year for her birthday. She’d turned 62 that year. She never married. Lived in a bungalow on Orange Avenue with a lot of cats. Lovely old thing. Like a grandmother without the blood relation. I already missed her.

New counselor meant having to prove that I was just another kid and not something to save from myself. Or commit to a looney bin. And these new counselors, all with doctorates and degrees. Every top level hierarchy bootlick had a fucking doctorate now. Problem was, they still had no idea what kids my age were going through.

These people were baby boomers and the following generation, who grew up in the time of Peace and Love and Tie-dye, immersed in Disco, Wall Street and money. Sure they saw Kennedy and the good Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated, heavy racial unrest and Vietnam, glam rock, punk rock and the Cold War.

But they had no idea about how things were now. No idea that the gangs were only just beginning really, Crips and Bloods just starting to flower into the giant multi-armed entity it became. No idea how rampant the drug problem had really gotten, how kids as young as 9 were snorting cocaine, smoking weed and drinking out of mommy’s gin tumbler. No idea about the poverty level. No idea exactly the kind of horrible bullshit almost every single kid had to go through every single day, just to live. How some kids had to literally run to school every day to keep from being shot. How some kids had to pick through their neighbors garbage every night to get something to eat. How some kids were taking care of their dysfunctional working parents instead of the parents taking care of them.

The 90's were a rough time to be a teenager. It sucked balls, to be crude. And I was miserable. Guess that’s why the school insisted I see a counselor every week for the rest of my bid there.

This new breed of Learning Professional had no clue what was really happening in the world they had set out to save and preserve.

What was worse was that they believed that their spiffy Doctorates in Child Psychology would absolutely cure whatever problem child they came across. Funny people, this breed. Thinking their open-minded and yet blind to the dump truck of a reality they’d jumped into. I always wanted to peel their eyelids back and show them what exactly was going on beneath their noses. But they only would’ve drugged it away, I suspect.

Medicate the bad away. Hmm... Don’t trust anyone over 30, huh Doctor Sunshine? Cute. Have another Cosmic Kool-Aid and see the music, Captain Cloud.

“Jessica Shastid,” Cathy the secretary said suddenly, and I jumped again. “The counselor will see you now.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I mumbled and stood up, shuffling my boots on the dusty laminated tiles.

I came to stand before the same door of Mrs. Trendle’s office. I wondered if the office would look the same, smell the same. Like old wood, pretty pictures of purple mountains and Pine Sol.

The ghosts of Mrs. Trendle’s name were still on the frosted pane of glass in the middle-upper section of the heavy door. New gold-lined black decals now though, over the ghosts, spelling out a new name. I had to look at it twice to make sure I was seeing it right however. Name read “Dr. Damian Diablon.” Great, another doctor. I stared at the last name a moment longer, mouthing the word without it’s last letter. It brought a small smile to my lips; Dr. Diablo, Dr. Devil in Spanish. How amusing!

I clasped the brass doorknob and turned it quickly. The doors in this building were old and heavy, always felt like one was moving iron barn doors when pulling them open.

I let the door close behind me with a metallic little cli-chink and then I stood in the office, still and silent, looking around half curious, half scrutinizing.

Before me was a wide black-laminated desk with one of the newer MacIntosh computers on it, back when they looked like tall grey boxes and served as slightly better than a word processor. Behind the desk was a modern, thick, polished black leather winged chair, turned to look out the large bay window that looked out over the Senior Quad.–Seniors always got the largest quad on the campus, juniors the second largest, and the sophomores and freshmen got the third tiny quad over by the electives classes building. It was all about prime realistate.–There were new black tin blinds over the windows, fresh paint on the walls, new bookshelves with what looked to be half a real library stacked in them.

All of it was a dark color, the walls even were newly storm-cloud grey. Different shade than what was splattered on the walls of the rest of the building. There was a padded chair set before the desk, looked like a step up from the hard plastic and wood things I was talking about before. To my right, against the wall, was a black leather couch. True shrink style couch. Pictures and certificates and accreditations peppered around surfaces and walls.

My gaze circled back around to the leather winged chair beyond the desk. Doctor Diablo was sitting there, only the top of his head visible in the subtle dip of the seat-back. He had hair, lots of it, shiny black and kinda mussy. Maybe more of a hippie than most doctors of demon-child psychobabble? Couldn’t be sure just from the crown of his head though. He wasn’t balding, that was certain.

I raised a brow and took two long strides up to the desk, arcing my neck around to try and see more of him. He had long thin legs, black jeans, pointed cowboy boots in Black Mamba snake skin. He had the heels of the boots propped atop one-another on the low-wall radiator that ran the length of the rooms beneath the windows in every building and that no longer worked.

They were hot steam heaters, the really old ones that if you touched ‘em when they were on you got burned pretty bad. But like I said, these didn’t work anymore. Pipes had been disconnected for at least four years in all the schools by then.  

The counselor had his feet kicked up on top of the radiator, long legs straight and relaxed in faded black jean. Curious... no hippie I knew wore this much black, let alone, deigned to wear actual animal skin unless they were certain it died of natural causes. In other words, unless the commune had skinned the bull what died from old age, tanned it’s hide and sewn it from home spun woolen thread of the organic sheep, they wore second-hand-store hand-me-downs of old bell-bottoms, and cotton gear and whatever their Great Grandma Ballard knitted for them. My experience told me this much.

The guy didn’t move, didn’t speak. I chewed at my lower lip a moment and then sniffed loudly. “Dr. Diablo?” I couldn’t help the grin that came with the purposeful mispronunciation.

“Ah. Jessica, please...” His hands tented together before him when he said my name, I could see his fingertips. His voice was an even mid-tenor, sounded smooth but it had a strange inflection to it; something I couldn’t quite place. Sort of sent a chill down my spine, but then again, a lot of things did that to me back then. I just didn’t let it show that it did. “Have a seat. Wherever you’d like.”

I stared at the crown of glinting black hair and slowly sat down in the padded chair. It was slightly less uncomfortable than the wooden monstrosity in the waiting room. But I was less concerned with accommodations. He didn’t move. Didn’t even try to correct me in pronouncing his last name. I narrowed my eyes skeptically. Something felt odd here. The tone in his voice felt kind of... vitiated. But maybe I was over-reacting, being overly defensive yet. A lot of people had a way of sounding like they weren’t. Some sounded large when they were small, some sounded mean when they were friendly. Vice-versa and everything in between.  

I missed Mrs. Trendle. Poor old thing. I missed the old smell of Pine Sol and her Victorian scent. It smelled like dusty books and oiled leather in here now. Faint scent of cigarette smoke on top of it caught my attention and my eyes widened only a little. I scanned the desk for an ash tray. But he probably hid it in a drawer somewhere, seeing as the ban on smoking in the public schools was in full effect now. I wondered what kind he smoked. I preferred Marlborro Medium 100's myself. I really wanted one now too.

The silence was new, I discovered sitting there. I couldn’t hear any clock tick. Glancing the walls, I found that the school clock up in the corner was gone. No more incessant ticking backwards. I appreciated that on a deep level. There was the muffled sound of people in the corridors and other offices; typing, printing, copying, talking, walking with heels, phones ringing and such. But more than any of that, it was just quiet.

“I’ve been very eager to meet you, Jessica. Mrs. Trendle left a very detailed letter about you for me. Actually, she gave me your file personally.” The way he talked, it was almost like he was telling a dirty limerick. And he paused a lot.

“Yeah?” I said, “so what.” I wasn’t about to let him needle me.

The chair creaked and slowly spun round to face me. I stopped short and stared at the man. I wasn’t sure if what I saw was for real. This guy didn’t look a damn thing like any school counselor I’d ever seen. He was no hippie, no preppie, no middle-class servant. He looked like some kind of rock critic in a way, from the journalists I’d seen on MTV. He was gaunt and grievous in a way, his face long and pale with thin lines around a thin mouth. His nose was hawkish, his grey eyes were bright and gleamed with some weird unnatural light, like crystal gets sometimes in certain lights. His brows were sharp, expressive and tweaked a little like one higher than the other. He appeared to be middle-aged with those lines around his mouth, but his skin was smooth and unmarred. His hair was long, wavy, shoulder-length and thick black. He was dressed entirely in black, the long-sleeved black t-shirt loose on his thin frame. His hands were fascinating to me, long bony fingers, kind of spindly in a way. In all appearances, he looked... long. Tall and long and thin.

His eyes settled easy on mine and there was a strange expression on them. I thought quickly about my appearance. Nothing really crazy, actually. Actually, I was dressed almost exactly the same, except a bit more flash. Black jeans, black boots (though mine weren’t cowboy boots, they were heavier replicas of Doc Marten’ 18-eyes with steel plates over the toes,) black t-shirt, a dark blue plaid flannel shirt tied around my waist, and a black leather jacket. My hair was black but I was sporting a kind of Mohawk, one side of my head shaved to the skin, the other trimmed to tapered lengths and a shock of chin-length from the crown. I wore black eyeliner and shadow around brown eyes, but that was it. No other make-up. I hated the way it made me feel suffocated. I was pale, my acne was fair enough, and any injury I might have had was well-hidden I made sure.

Really, except for the classification of ‘Gothic Metalhead’ I belonged nowhere and in no company. I was the full effect of the classic loner.

I blinked at him for a few beats, watching his lips pull into a smile that was at once disarming and disturbing. He had very straight white teeth. If he was trying to be friendly and open, he was effecting intense and piercing instead. I furrowed my brows at him.

“You’re the new school counselor?” I asked skeptically.

He leaned forward, elbows on the table and nodded. “Yes. Damian Diablon. You can call me Damian though.”

He didn’t use the title. He didn’t say Doctor Damian Diablon, and he pronounced his last name “Dee-ahb-lone.” My head twitched to the side and I regarded him hard. He continued to smile.

“You’re the counselor. Doctor Diablon.” I stated in incredulity.

“I am. You don’t believe me, Jessica?” His voice purred.

“Aw man please! Don’t say that name!” My face scrunched. Every time someone said my full first name I cringed. I hated my name. It was so feminine and didn’t fit me. Something people always said when they were pissed at me was my full first name. Felt like Bad Juju, as one of my weirdo Wiccan friends used to say.

“Ok. What do you want me to call you?”

I cut my eyes to him and chewed my lower lip. “Everyone just calls me Jess, around here. ‘Cept the teachers and faculty.”

“Staff and faculty have to use the titles apparently. I hate it. Formalities. Doctor this, Professor that. Utter nonsense. Some deed meant to make someone feel more important and more right than another. Fuck that.” He spoke comfortably, tossing off the F-word like it was basic every day conversation. Ok well, like he was easy with talking like that in front of a kid.

I peered back at him, noticing how he was one of those people who looked you right in the eye, addressed you and spoke to you. Interesting. People around here never met eye to eye for longer than a millisecond. Call it resignation or whatever, people just didn’t do that.

“So you don’t want me to call you Doctor, then.” I said.

“No.” He shook his head, blinking. “I want you to call me Damian.”

“You know that’s the name of the kid in The Omen flicks right?” I said with a slight smirk. “The spawn of the devil?”

“I love those films. I have to say though, I think The Exorcist was more terrifying than The Omen.” He laughed a little.

I smiled strangely at him. Horror movie buff. This guy was certainly not your run of the mill school shrink. I shook my head and smirked to myself. He regarded me curiously.

“What’s on your mind?”

“It’s just that, well...” I snorted in disbelief and sat back in the chair, rubbing my eyes. “It’s not like your appearance says uptight, BA in child psychology, man. Even you have to see that. How’d you get this gig anyway, Damian?” I couldn’t help being a bit snarky, but I smiled at him still.

Damian glanced himself once, and grinned. “I admit, I’m not the usual specimen of high school shrink you would commonly get.” His eyes seemed to grab me. “I might hang myself if I was, tell you the truth, Jess.”

“So why are you doing this? Is being a sounding board for an overstuffed campus full of angry, pent-up teenagers really what you wanted to do with your life? I mean you look like you aught to be out at the Whiskey or the Roxy. Writing articles on James Hetfield or Axl Rose, maybe. This really what you wanted to do?” I squinted at him.

He looked thoughtful. “This is not exactly what I had in mind, really. It’s more that I wanted to help kids like you. I feel like I’m on that same edge you seem to be on. World gone insane, dangerous times wrapping around your throat like dead weight. I feel more inclined to you than what would be considered my generation, in a way. Feel like I am here to be your friend. Like I am here for you.” He pointed his right index finger at me lightly.

A strange way of putting it, but he seemed convinced of it. Matter of fact, he sounded down-right positive, almost like he was saying it purely to me alone. However, the words he stressed made him sound just slightly lurid. In a way, I guess I liked that. I snickered and shook my head.

“You are unreal, Doc. Unreal.”

“You don’t like me?” He asked lightly, a giggle rising in his throat.

“You ask strange questions. You look strange. You act strange. You are extremely strange.” Voicing my inner dialogue had him lift his brows curiously at me. He seemed almost pleased with the moniker ‘strange.’ Couldn’t help that I liked that too. “Yeah, I like you fine, Damian, you’re just a little... unsettling, is all.”

He smiled again and sat back. “That is perfectly alright. I unsettle the meanest mothers, I’m sure. But you can trust me, Jess. With anything.”

“Sure, man. Whatever you say.” I tossed it off, certain that it was just something that all shrinks had to say.

We sat for a few beats smiling at each other until it became a bit uneasy and I cracked my knuckles to fill the silence. He laughed lightly in his throat and then cleared it.

“So Jess, why don’t you tell me about yourself.” He grinned in a way that looked near predator-like.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“I’m not going to bite.” He joked.

Weird thing to say.

I took a deep breath. “Ok. Well, you know my name. I go to school here, where it rivals a bad negative of Sweet Valley High. I’m a loner. I listen to the devil’s music. I commit random acts of violence on a semi-regular basis, practice voodoo, channel spirits. I’m failing P.E. and third period English Lit. Oh, and my parents don’t give a flying fuck about me.” Most of it was bullshit, but the truth was in there. I glared at him to see if I could get a rise out of him.

“Voodoo you say?” He smiled, taking the jab with ease.

“Yeah, I find that Haitian voodoo works best on cheerleaders and jocks.” I grinned this grin that I knew showed my sharp canine teeth. Something that I used to disturb some of my classmates with.

He laughed lightly. “Well, they can use a little demonic possession every now and then if you ask me.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Those are some nice fangs you got there. Dentist in the family?”

“Heh, the kids call me Vampirella sometimes.” I admitted. Strange thing though, it usually hurt when they called me that. I don’t know why.

When I looked up, Damian was looking at me with a strange wistfulness. “You said you were a loner. You don’t have any friends here?”

“All the kids here are in one clique or another. There’s even a Goth clique and they don’t even want me. Think I’m too Metal. Metalhead’s think I’m too Goth. I don’t quite... fit in here. Think I was dropped into the wrong city at the wrong time.”

“I beg to differ.” He mumbled.

“What?”

“Everyone’s here for a reason. I’m here to be a weird corner for the weird to be alright. You’re here for a reason as much as I am.”

“That Doctorate is showing, Doctor.” I said slyly.

“Touche.” He smirked.

I leaned forward and put my elbows on the edge of his black laminated desk and regarded him curiously. “What about you?”

He made a face and leaned forward on the desk as well. “I’m a very strange man in the negative of a Sweet Valley High book talking to a Metalhead-Goth that dabbles in Haitian voodoo and is failing Gym and English.” He winked at me.

I laughed and shook my head again. He had me, for certain he had me, if not perplexed then entranced. He laughed with me, relaxed and calm. I sat back and sighed, glancing at the metal toes dully reflecting the room back to me.

“Listen,” Damian stood up and walked around the desk, coming to me.

My hackles rose up like blown steam. He might as well have been a rottweiler making a sudden aggressive movement the way I got spooked then. Heart started to race and my muscles all tensed up. I planted my heels into the floor and shoved backward, the chair grating across the floor, and stared wide eyed at him.

Damian looked surprised by this, a little insulted. He raised his hands, palms out, and approached slower.

“Easy, easy. I’m not going to hurt you, Jess. I just wanted to ask you something.”  His face appeared innocent and well-meaning, but I was still unsure.

I swallowed hard and cleared my throat. “I’m not good with sudden movements.” The nervousness was choking my voice into a quiver.

He nodded and made an agreeable noise. “Alright, I’ll remember that.”

“Yeah, you do that, Doc.” I tried to level my shoulders and relax.  

He sat carefully on the edge of his desk before me, still holding his hands up. “Do you trust me, Jess?”

I stared at him silently for a few beats. Crazy thing was, despite a general feeling of malaise I felt, he was the first person I didn’t want to completely write off that worked at this school. I gave him a slight nod.

“Do you feel alright talking to me?” A careful smile on his thin lips, he clasped his hands loosely before him in his lap.

Could smell his clothes then. Clean. Vague scent of cologne, not overwhelming.

I looked him up and down. Rail thin bugger, I thought to myself, strange person. But he was amusing and the fact that he intrigued me was pressing me.

“Yeah.” I said uncertain at first, but then more confidently. “Yeah, you’re alright, Doc. Sure.”

“Then we can be friends?” His eyes wide and bright like a disturbed cartoon pleading innocence.

“I guess so.” I said, and the edge of my mouth turned upward coyly. “Just don’t go thinking we’re gonna be hanging out at the mall or going off to gigs together or something like that. Alright, Damian?” Half my mouth turned upward.

He smiled. “Deal.”