Mellie's Account

When there’s an adventure coming, my fingernails get really itchy like there’s something crawling through them. My mom’s always telling me that I shouldn’t go looking for trouble, but it’s just like I said, the trouble comes to me. It walks right up to me.

And sometimes it walks like a funny-looking old man, and what am I supposed to do, then? I mean, you get it. If you only saw this guy, I’m talking about Ole Man Grody, if you only saw this man, you’d have followed him to the bakery shop, too.

Of course I didn’t follow him, alone. I mean, of course I had my crew with me. I’m talking about Jemmy and Hugo, of course. But you know them. And Hugo never really liked Ole Man Grody, on account of his appearances. But that was the best of it, and that’s what I told Hugo, too, his looks was the best of it. Because how do you go on looking like that in Plankton, of all places, and stink and not even care, anyway? It was because he had a treasure. There was something he had that none of Plankton knew about.

And we found it at the duck pond. Hugo didn’t get it. He thinks he’s so smart sometimes, it’s dumb. And Jemmy… well, yeah, that’s Jemmy. He had two kids with him. Ole Man Grody, at the duck pond. Keep up with me here. Two kids that none of us knew, not even Jemmy. And they were all friendly. No… more than friendly. They were family. Can you believe it? Ole Man Grody had a family, a real family, of all things.

Hugo says Jemmy was the one to see him first. Jemmy! Does that even sound like Jemmy to you? No, it was me. I saw him first. I saw him first after I fell off that big twisty tree on Grove Street. I meant to jump off, but falling’s close enough to jumping sometimes. Just as I was falling, well, Ole Man Grody, I swear, he was walking by. He caught me, mid-air.  It was like some dorky movie scene. Man, did he stink, but I kept my manners, I said thanks, anyway. And he just set me down and kept walking that funny walk of his. So, yeah. That’s when I had noticed him and a few days later I told the crew we should follow him.

I’m always falling off stuff like that, but I never get more than a scrape or two, anyway. My mom, she freaks out really bad sometimes. But I never see her much, anyway because she works the late shift and sleeps during the day time. Huh? No, I don’t got any brothers or sisters or anything like that. Anyway, I got my crew and that’s gotta count for something.

Let’s see, how I met my crew… Well, Jemmy, I met him since we was both in Ms. Kishta’s class. But the funny one is really Hugo. I didn’t meet him that much ago, actually, well… just this summer. I was running to the train tracks to wait for the train that goes to Penn Station to go by. It’s always packed with people and I like to wave at them and make funny faces and sometimes they wave back. So I was running to the train tracks and there’s Hugo, reading, actually reading and it’s summer. And he’s not even in summer school! I thought that was really funny. The way he talked too. So I knew he had to join my crew.  He said, “Ok. But I must be home by 2:45pm, not a minute later.” Oh, Hugo.

Jeremy's Account

My name is Jeremy Barnes and I am 10 years old. Soon I will be 11 years old. I am supposed to tell you about ole man grodey. He is a homeless man. That means he doesn’t have a bathtub, or a bedroom or even a dining room. We have a dining room and a china cabinet. Except I’m not allowed to touch the china cabinet. I don’t ever go in the dining room, anyway, except like on Christmas, so I guess it is okay that he doesn’t have one. But maybe he should have a bathtub because he looks really dirty, like he could use a bath.

Anyway, I have a bouncy ball collection. I started it when I was 9 years old and have had it ever since. I like bouncy balls because, if you throw them against like a wall, they can bounce back to you and then it doesn’t matter like if Mellie, or even Hugo, is busy because I can have fun, anyway. The wall of that store on main street is really good because when the ball bounces it makes this funny sound like a space ship and the ball goes straight back to you. Really cool. So I play there a lot and sometimes Mellie and Hugo come and then we all play things. Well, now we don’t do that so much because we are in grade 4. And when you are in grade 4 you get more homework and that means we don’t get to play so much like when we were on break.

So one time, when I was playing with the bouncy ball and Mellie was talking to Hugo about something, that time, I saw ole man grodey. Only he wasn’t ole man grodey, yet. I said something like, “That man’s legs are funny”. And Hugo had his notebook with him, like he always does and he made a scrunchy face and scribbled something. And then, like a few days after that, Mellie told us to go follow that guy, only she called him ole man grodey. So we did.

I like Mellie a whole lot because she always has these really good ideas. Only she goes missing for days sometimes, and I know it’s because she gets in trouble but she always says it’s because she goes to visit some aunt. I don’t think Mellie has any aunts because I don’t think she has much family, at all. And I don’t think she even has a china cabinet or a dining room. But I like her a whole lot and I knew her since I was 5, which means we are best friends. But I don’t know Hugo that much, but I guess he is okay. Mellie says she saw him looking really hard at something, when she first saw him. And she thought he was maybe doing homework, only it was summer. And now we are all friends.

When we first followed ole man grodey, we thought it was going to be a real sort of adventure. Only it wasn’t really an adventure at all. In adventures, people find treasures or someone dies, but never the hero. But none of that happened. We just watched him buy bread and then he took it to some kids at the duck pond. And Mellie asked me if I knew those kids, but I never did see them around and I have lived in Plankton since the day I was born. But Mellie seemed to think there was something special about ole man grodey, and his bread, and those kids at the duck pond, so we kept following that man all summer long. 

Hugo's Account

More often than not, storytellers show a total disregard, disrespect, disloyalty to the details. They omit, exaggerate, fabricate and lie.  Yes, examples of hyperbole, poetic license, what I refer to as outright deception, can be seen in all of the so-called great narratives, from Uncle Joe’s descriptions of the hardships he endured when he was “my age” to Shakespeare’s Othello. This is not that type of story.

Rest assured, dear reader, that the events occurred precisely in this manner. I have plenty of documentation as well as witnesses available to back up my claims. If, after reading the following account of events, you are at all skeptical of my authenticity, I would urge you to contact me at the following address:

Hugo Garcia

630 Morgan Street

Plankton, PA 15535

It just so happens that 5 months and 3 days ago, in the summer of 2010, my mother and I moved to the town of Plankton, Pennsylvania. This is, in fact, the beginning of my story. According to my records, within a week of moving to town, I made the acquaintance of one Mellie (whose last name and age I have never had the courage to inquire). Mellie Last-Name-Unknown happened to be running through my neighborhood, her face, dress and shoes ruined with mud (an appearance that I would soon learn was not uncommon for her), when she noticed me sitting at my front steps with that month’s issue of Scientific American.

The first words I heard her utter were the following: “Hey, new kid! You [sic] in summer school or somefinn[sic]?”

I assured her that I was not in summer school, but that I was registered to start the 4^th grade at Plankton Elementary that fall. She expressed some enthusiasm at that notion and proclaimed that she, too, would soon be in the 4^th grade. And with that, she insisted that I join her “crew”.

It was sometime between noon and 2:30pm that we finally arrived at the abandoned parking lot behind what was apparently once a Dollar Store on Main Street. A young boy, who I now know to be one Jeremy (or “Jemmy” as Mellie called him) Barnes (current age: 10.5), was busy throwing a bouncy ball against the back wall of that Main Street Dollar Store. He bounced the ball against the wall three times before he noticed us. This was her crew.

So it happened that being a part of Mellie’s crew occupied the rest of my summer. Our biggest obsession, the basis for all our adventures, and indeed core of this story surrounds an old homeless man (whose name and age not even Mellie had the audacity to inquire). We called him Old Man Grody.

It was Jeremy who had noticed him first, without a doubt. That much is documented. However, the manner in which Jeremy came to notice this man, came to realize what wonder, what horrific, repulsive, exciting, wonder he could bring to the crew, that much I am uncertain about. Jeremy noticed him first, but Mellie was the one to baptize him. As soon as she said, “Let’s go follow Old Man Grody”, I knew exactly who she meant, and the name, the idea of it all, resonated perfectly.

On August 15^th, 2010 at 12:32pm, exactly, Old Man Grody, was wearing his usual dusty Steelers cap, an unkempt beard (no doubt hiding an equally neglected mouth full of rotting enamel), a tattered undershirt and denim shorts (his scrawny legs distastefully swinging out with each step), as he entered the bakery right off Main Street. His behavior inside the bakery was the following:

12:33- Old Man Grody approaches the counter, dropping an assortment of change. Some pennies fall to the ground.

12:34- The lady behind the counter waits patiently as Old Man Grody picks up the pennies and shoves the change in her direction.

12:35- The lady goes to the back of the store. Old Man Grody stands waiting. He takes his Steelers cap off momentarily to reveal a full head of grey hair.

12:38- The lady returns with a bag full of bread loaves. She hands it to Old Man Grody, who nods and smiles.

12:40- We start to run away as it appears Old Man Grody is about to leave the bakery.

It was not until around 1:30pm that we caught sight of Old Man Grody once more. His bag of bread considerably more empty, Mellie hypothesized that we would soon discover his super secret sleeping quarters. “That’s where he keeps his treasure, and it’s safe too cuz [sic] it stinks so bad even the cops won’t go near it!”

So imagine our disappointment to learn that Old Man Grody was simply going to the duck pond. At approximately 1:53pm, he approached the rusty bench in front of the duck pond. Two kids, one girl who might have been as old as 10, and a boy, who was around my age, were waiting for him at the bench. I didn’t know who they were, but that did not surprise me as I didn’t really know anyone outside of the crew. “Jemmy, you know those kids?” Mellie whispered, and Jeremy shook his head no.

We watched the three of them eat that bread slowly, sitting in front of the duck pond. We were too far off to hear anything they said. They did not even seem to move. At 2:20pm, I decided to head back home as my mother would start to worry if I were not there by 2:45pm. As I ran towards Morgan Street, I could hear Mellie shouting out, “Let’s follow him again, tomorrow!”And as soon as she said it, I knew it was what we were meant to do. 

Blind Cat

The road that led to his sister’s house was a literal pain in the ass. I’m talking potholes inside of potholes, street vendors that came out of nowhere, and rush hour traffic at all hours of the day. People weren’t riding bikes anymore. He might as well have been the last bicyclist alive. How many times would he put up with getting run off the road, or being needlessly harassed? How many times would he put his life on the line before he told his sister he couldn’t, wouldn’t make the trip anymore?

Well, who knows, really, but there he was that day. His niece, Pam, answered the door. She was eight, but she looked younger. He kept thinking she was six and it annoyed her. She called him by his first name. Bert. Not Uncle Bert. “Hi, Bert.” It was always “Hi”, not “Hello”. But he didn’t mind. He hugged her as she squirmed to escape his cologne.

He had a nephew. Dan. Thirteen years old. He called him Bert, too. Bert, that was all. No “Hi” or “Hello”. They used to play Super Nintendo together, Bert and his nephew. But Bert mostly just watched now as Pam and Dan would play against each other.

And here’s the thing about Bert, he didn’t have any kids of his own. Yeah, I mean it, that’s Bert in a nutshell. He was married, happily. But she couldn’t… well, the doctors said that… Anyway, Bert had his niece and nephew to take care of while his sister and brother-in-law went to work.

About Bert and his wife, it’s important to know how they met. Bert was rather handsome when he was young. Clever, charming even. Yeah, all the young gals in the neighborhood knew who he was. How could they not? Their mothers would always say things like, “Oh, but imagine marrying a guy like Bert from down the road…” And what could these young women do but memorize his weekly schedule? He got off the 4 o’clock bus from the city on the weekdays, walked to the corner grocery store, bought a small bag of chips or a Coke (never both), and then slowly walked home. What could they do but strategically cross his path whenever possible? On the weekends, he would ride his bike to the city or the junkyard, or run errands for his father. He was the watchmaker’s son. The future engineer.

But who was she? She wasn’t really going anywhere. She was loud, that’s for sure. Her dresses were slightly too short. She had curves in all the wrong places. And she didn’t care. She just didn’t care. And it wasn’t even that vulnerable sort of indifference that comes across as callousness or arrogance. She just didn’t know any better!

The day they met, she happened to be selling women’s perfume door to door. She was always getting involved in silly businesses like that. Her mother would tell her, “There’s three buses to the city. Every day. No one’s gonna want to pre-order crap perfume from you… Listen to me, crap perfume they gotta wait three- four! Four weeks they gotta wait to even get the stuff. When they can just take the 10 o’clock bus and get the really good stuff that same day, ya dunce!” It was always “dunce”, never really “Liz” or “Lizzy” like it used to be.

So she knocked on his door that day, the poor girl. She could see someone moving about behind the front window and she tugged at the hem of her skirt, thinking this could be the one, this would show her mom. No, it wasn’t our guy, Bert, who answered the door. That would be too easy. It was his father.

“What do you want?”

“Hello sir or madam. Are you upset at the rising cost of brand name perfumes and colognes?”

“We don’t want any.”

And he slammed the door.

She stood there, stunned, mumbling the rest of her speech to herself. And that was when Bert got home. He watched her for a bit, an empty bottle of Coke in his hand.

“Are you dropping off a watch?”

She turned around to face him. And he knew, just from the look of her, that she was lost. Not just then, not just at that moment. That she was the sort of woman who could go through her life without really going anywhere.

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m his son. I’m the watchmaker’s son.”

And then it hit her. This was the one. This would show her mom.

“Hello sir or madam…”

So he bought some cologne and married her soon enough. I might have wasted your time with all of that, actually. That’s not really our Bert, after all, the Bert of this story. He never did become an engineer. Well, it’s my story to tell, so stop interrupting.

You see, Bert was the sort of man who just cared too much. Too much about Liz, about his father, his sister, his niece and nephew. His brother-in-law? Yeah, he was okay too. God! Was there anybody in the universe Bert just didn’t give a damn about? And even though it really should have been Liz who put her life on hold, so Bert could pursue his career. Bert offered, he insisted, that he would do whatever possible so that she could get herself a little business. She sold women’s lingerie. Nothing too fancy, but she was happy just the same.  And what about Bert? Nobody bothered to ask. He still ran errands for his father on the weekends. And, on the weekdays, he would ride his bike early, every morning, down that hellish road, to take care of his niece and nephew.

“Bert, Bert! On the balcony!”

It was Pam. Her voice shrilled with excitement. Her face was red and sweaty like she had run down from the second floor balcony to the kitchen at top speed. She was such a tiny little thing and she had so much energy.

Bert was washing the dishes. His sister never asked him to, but that’s our Bert. She didn’t have to ask. Dan walked up behind Pam, slowly. That was a new thing he was doing, you know, to further separate himself from Pam. He would let her get a head-start and walk nonchalantly behind her.

“There’s a kitten on the balcony, Bert,” he said.

He avoided eye contact to hide his enthusiasm.

“A kitten?”

“And it doesn’t have a collar! And it’s really dirty, Bert, with mud! It’s definitely a stray. You think we could keep her?”

Pam was leaning over the counter now, her knuckles digging into the marble.

“You’d have to ask your parents.”

“Well, maybe we could wash it. And give it some milk because… it’s really small, you know?”

That was another thing Dan had started doing, ending his sentences in question marks.

“Yeah, all right. We’ll give it a bath in the bathroom sink. And maybe some milk, too. But we’ll have to ask your parents if you can keep it.”

The kitten was sitting at the corner of the balcony. It was a dirty, white little thing. Bert wrapped a towel around it and carried it to the bathroom sink.

The bathroom was much too large for Bert’s liking. Worse still, the floor and walls were covered in awful mint-colored tiles. It was very… clean. He placed the kitten in the bathroom sink. He watched it struggle for a bit, hopelessly clawing at the unfamiliar porcelain terrain.

Bert murmured, “It’s okay.”

But the kitten mewed in a panic.

Pam was dancing around the bathroom, now. Thinking of all the games she would play with her newfound friend.

“Oh, she doesn’t like baths!” She giggled.

Dan was standing by the doorway. He was practicing a lean he had seen other teenagers do.

Bert turned on the faucet, now. Just enough for a steady stream. The kitten clawed at the porcelain frantically.

“Hold still,” said Bert, pinning it down gently, beneath the stream.

“I think I’ll name her Aurora,” Pam said, hopping on the tiles. She made sure to hop on every other tile. These were the sort of games Pam was developing now that Dan wouldn’t play with her as much.

“Maybe it’s not a girl cat, you know?” Dan said.

If it had been a bigger cat, it might have managed to let out some menacing howls. It was pathetic, really, how it mewed on and on, stuck under that steady stream of water. That was when Bert noticed that there was something strange about its eyes.

“It can’t be a boy cat because did you see its eyes? It has girl eyes.”

They were a cloudy grey and didn’t seem to be looking… anywhere, or at anything. This was a blind cat. And how did it get on the balcony?

“I think it’s a boy cat. I wanna name him Yeti.”

And suddenly it made sense, why it was so helpless and tiny. Its mother had left it there. It had been abandoned.

“It’s not your cat! You can’t give it a name because it’s not your cat, anyway!”

Poor little thing. It really was disgustingly pathetic how it mewed, not knowing who or what it was mewing at. What was the best thing to do at a time like this?

“It’s not your cat, either! Bert said we have to wait ‘til Mom and Dad say yes, first.”

There were always a bunch of stray cats where Bert had grown up. His father sometimes had him catch and kill the loud ones, the ones that knocked over pots in the patio and peed everywhere.

He thought he might snap its neck if he squeezed hard enough. But it had been a few years since he’d killed a cat. God. How the thing mewed. They were tiny, sweet little mews. They were terribly endearing. It wouldn’t stop. This blind, hopeless, little creature would not stop fighting.

So Bert slammed its head against the porcelain. Bloody, muddy stains washed away by that same steady stream. And the damn cat was crying! No, it was Pam. And whose tears were on his face? Its legs twitched a bit. He kept slamming that cat on the sink like some dusty rug.

Dan held onto his sister as she gasped like she was drowning.

“Stop! Bert, stop! It’s dead! It’s dead.”