Venom Chapter 5

          We are all going to die from cancer.
Adam and I came to that unsettling revelation sitting in a white-speckled church kitchen at five-thirty on one particular afternoon.  It was August, and there was no air-conditioning.  It was a hell of a time to lay that kind of news on someone, much less impressionable kids.  Cancer is a damn serious deal, right up there with the Stanley Cup and global warming (although I would guess that only a handful of folks really get upset over global warming…it is more of a trendy chic passion, something Al Gore has a hard-on for, you know, assume Al Gore has hard-ons.).  Now these old, fat people are making us feel real uncomfortable, with talks of searching for a cure and such nonsense. 
         “There’s always hope, somehow, we haveta give these folks hope” said one particularly overweight one with a Mickey Mouse shirt that draped itself like a table linen.
         “Hope?  I m pretty sure this country got to the moon by throwing money at problems…not hope,” I whispered to Adam.
         Adam stared wide-eyed, darting from left to right.  I think he was looking for the closest exit.  I wasn’t so hopeful; as far as I could tell we were done for.  Even if we could get past the old people, cancer would get us in the long run.  It was better to sit and wait.  Maybe there was some good information coming; mainly how to avoid getting cancer.  And I wasn’t going to wear any darned sunblock, either.  I was as white as dove to begin with.  Lord knows I needed all the exposure I could get.  Sunburn never really hurt anybody, right?  Maybe not.  The Russians once built some awesome freedom-and-democracy-seeking missile and we ended up calling it the “Sunburn”.  Russians probably freeze their butts off up there in the hinterlands.  Holy crap, I bet they are terrified of sunburn. 
         “No, this country got to the moon by lying about it.  Come on, you really think there was a man on the moon?”
         “I’ve seen pictures.”
         Adam shook his head.  “They’re doctored.”
         “You don’t believe that, do you?”
         Adam scowled and turned his head slowly, not letting his eyes come off me. 
         An effervescently annoying woman waddled to the front of our ragged forum of folding tables.  I was sitting with Adam in the corner, neatly and tidily tucked away from the seven others.  Our table was especially gruesome.  The wood was splintering and cracked.  My arms chaffed against the grain leaving little dark spots of sweat.  Darn her, she had better say whatever she needed to say fast.
         Of course that was too much to ask for.
         “She needs to shut the heck up,” I said to Adam, who was doodling on his new Cancer Awareness Week notebook.  What is it with some people, I wondered?  She went on and on about how great the event was and what an awesome job we are going to do next year.  I half expected tears.  Maybe they will still come.  She is on to her mother dying of cancer.  Of course: personal validation.  Here come the tears, big fat ones; some sympathy from the others.  Why do these things always have to get so emotional?  And why didn’t I get a Cancer Awareness Week notebook?
         “Where did you get that?”
         Adam looked up.  “What?  It was over there, in the corner.”  I looked.  Of course they were gone now. 
         “Are you sure you were supposed to take that?”
         “Are you sure I give a crap?”
         Yeah, well, I was mostly annoyed that I didn’t get one.  Except that they were pink and purple.  Geez, what the heck are these cancer people thinking?  No wonder they were losing the grand biological global battle against the invisible enemy; they dress everyone like a queer.  And no, that is not at all homophobic; the gays are the ones who chose the rainbow as their flag. 
         “You know, they should choose better colors for this kind of stuff,” I whispered.
         “Yeah,” said Adam way too loud (I guess we stopped pretending to be paying attention, the woman was being hugged by the fat man and Mickey Mouse was saturated by sweat), “they should lay off the girl colors.  It should be like, black and silver or something.”
         “Black is kind of the color of death,” I said, “maybe they want to steer away from that.”
         “Yeah, but it is better than purple, who the hell wants to wear purple?  That doesn’t make me happy.  Purple makes me sad.”
         I didn’t think purple made people sad.  “You know, how come gay people get the rainbow?  Like, who authorized that?”
         Adam scowled.  “You know, I liked the rainbow.”
         “You still do.  Face it, gay men are trendy; even more than you.  I bet you’re jealous you are not gay.”  Several people turned to look.  Oops; too loud. 
         Another woman got up to talk.  It was mostly about money and what a great job everyone was doing.  She wasn’t tired from the heat, in fact she seemed overtly staunch and professional, which made me even more uncomfortable. 
         “Well,” she said with a big breath, clearly as eager to leave as we were, “I am so glad everyone could make it.  It is nice to share thoughts from such a wide variety of people.”  You could almost see the glare in our direction.  Look, for the last time, how were we to know the teepee was structurally unstable?  It’s not like it ruined the event or anything; it was raining all night long; people were miserable.  That was two years ago, anyway.  Last year was the stanchion bridge which, inevitably, collapsed in the middle of the night amid terrible screaming and laughter.  I was sure that if it weren’t for the incredible amounts of money we managed to raise we’d be uninvited, which is a pleasant word for ‘banned’.  Instead, Adam and I were asked to the join the steering committee.
         The lady detailed on-and-on about the year’s facts and figures, almost painstakingly.  Our team, Venom (unfortunate but ironic), donated an impressive five thousand dollars, the majority of which was raised door-to-door.  The nice thing about being eighteen is that when people decide they’d rather not give five dollars to a good cause, as in the case of at least one curmudgeonly old salt, you don’t feel at all guilty tipping over his trash or stealing his mail.  At the very least his flower beds were trampled.  The more I thought about it, we were kind of like the charity mafia.  It would’ve been much better for the old prick to lay up five bucks.  I can only assume his prostrate ballooned shortly thereafter.  Have fun sitting down to pee the rest of your life; should have given us some money. 
Hope isn’t cheap.
         Maybe some folks didn’t trust a bunch of young kids with a suspect looking coffee can.  Enough folks did that either we were convincing or there was a sudden rash of flower-bed awareness.
         The business-like woman concluded her introduction into what I assumed to be the formal course of discussion and opened the floor to ideas, or as she put it “what recommendations the steering committee has to offer the board for the next fiscal year.”   
         Adam: “Ask about the black and silver color scheme.”
         “I’m still not sure that is a great idea.”
         Adam held up his notepad.  It had an ink sketch of a latino-american guerrilla (“Guerrilla:” more ‘rebel-contra’ and less ‘oversized monkey,’ I noted) gunning down what looked to be a spleen, or maybe a kidney.
         “The gun looks Russian made,” I said.  “Is that supposed to be cancer?”
         “See, said Adam, “bad-ass!”
         Where did he get the pen?  It looked like it went together with the notepad.  I was more jealous then ever.  My arms started itching.  It was that darned table.
         An older man got up from his table.  He was well-dressed and had on a pair of the sunglasses that adjusted their tint to the sunlight.  They were somewhere between brown and yellow, and couldn’t help at all when he was trying to read his own notes, written of course on a custom notepad.  Geez, did everyone get one of those? 
There was some general pontificating about how the event could be run better, then a suggestion for better advertising.  Apparently, the fifty thousand dollars raised last year did not warrant the type of exposure that some thought it deemed.  Adam looked at me. 
         “You should bring up the chalk.”
         We had found, in our own brainstorming collective, the first step in advertising was finding your target audience.  Being that nearly everyone on the planet, or at least in Sharon, Pennsylvania, would at some point die of cancer (or maybe AIDS, but we could only fight one battle at a time), “everyone” was our target audience.  Another simple truth was that everyone pays taxes, with the possible exception of the President and about 10 million Mexican-Americans--so that was one way to get them.  Truth be told, we were unsure of how to sequester money that didn’t belong to us.  It became apparent that the Sharon Department of Revenue would strong arm us anyway (“Look,” said Adam, “it is just a stupid little donation envelope, just mail it out with everything else.  Why not?  We are taxpayers, damn it!  Fine, have it your way…may God have mercy upon your smitten soul.”)  We ended up trampling a lovely grove of annuals bought and paid for by the citizenry.  Public disobedience at its finest, we were sure.
         Matt had come up with Plan B, probably due to the fact that it involved defacing public property.  In addition to paying taxes, “everyone” was also forced to shop at WalMart, at a minimum, twice a week.  It was as though a billboard was strewn at our feet, waiting for the enterprising hands of youthful exploitation.  So on a Sunday night, dangerously overdosed on caffeine and Kool Aid, we set out with a bucket full of pastel MegaChalk.  I drove.
         The WalMart parking lot only took about an hour to graffiti.  “I think you misspelled ‘society’,” I said.  Matt looked at me with his head half coked in curiosity.  “Really?  Spell it.”
         Dramatic pause.  S-O-uh-C-E?-crap.  “Close enough.”
         “A’ight.”
         We moved on to both grocery stores, the hardware store, and a drive-thru.  It was nearly morning by the time we were done.  It didn’t much matter, we found shortly thereafter that WalMart sometimes (or in certain instances) decides to hose off any impurities from the parking lot.  The day after a torn half of manila folder was taped to the window with a marker scrawl, warning against ‘vandalism and solicitation.’
         “What does that even mean?” asked Matt.
         “Mostly that we won’t get a refund on the chalk,” I said.  Corporate America is really a self-feeding beast.

         Back in the church kitchen, looking at Adam, “I don’t think that got a single person interested in the event.”
         “It got Matt interested.”
         I nodded.  He was right.  Matt probably would have gone just for the chance to be seen, though. 
         The adults in the room, and I use the word as precociously as possible, had other ideas.  Boringly “inside the box” conversation ensued, despite the insistence that we all think “outside” of said “box”.
          The same (boorish) woman interrupted with a polite suggestion to offer ideas for entertainment. 
         “Dance party,” said Adam.
         We had tried that last year with little success.  Apparently only seven-year-olds like to dance to hip hop--and Matt, of course.  Money raised: zero dollars.
         There was awkward silence in the room, a pleasant surprise at this point in the meeting.  Adam was grimacing strongly, that perturbed look of concentration right before he is about to say something.  His voice always raises a little bit, like he is playing astute.  He raised his hand.
         “Hoboy,” I whispered.
         “This is for real,” said Adam, as he got the nod to speak.
         “I do have a suggestion,” said Adam in a creaky treble, “you know, there is public soap in the bathroom.  I think that is just really disgusting.”
         There was a slow but very deliberate nodding of heads in the front.  “Go on,” suggested the woman, “You say ‘public soap’?”
         “Yeah, public soap, like, a big green bar of Irish Spring of something; maybe not Irish Spring, it might be some kind of cheap rip-off, but there is it, sitting on the sink, all soapy and used.  And you pretty much have to use that restroom.  Or in the woods, I guess.  You know, for number one.”
         “Uh huh,” said the woman, taking her complimentary Cancer pen to jot something down on her complimentary pad; probably something about increasing the forest-border security. 
         “Well, who has been in that bathroom?” asked Adam.
         “You mean that green bar of soap,” said the fat man, “I know what you are talking about.”
         “That’s the one,” said Adam, “I mean; it would be better if it were not there at all, really, because you can’t just walk past the soap, you have to wash your hands--everybody is looking at you.  But is washing your hands even sanitary then?  I would argue it is less so, who knows where the last person has been with that soap.  We need a bottle of soft soap.”
         “I was unaware of the soap shortage,” said the lady.
         “Well, it is less a soap shortage and more of a public soap issue,” I suggested.  “How hard would it be to get some of that liquid soap in there?”
         “Or maybe some of that pumice that smells like orange,” suggested the fat man.  I looked back at him approvingly.  There is a guy who knows his man-soaps.
         “I would say,” continued Adam, “that the overall experience would be made, oh, twice as enjoyable if there was a stop to communal soap.  We are not in China.”
         “I would give it a forty percent increase in sponsor utility,” I added.  “Twice as much is a little liberal,” I whispered to Adam.
         “You have to sell these things,” he said.
         A middle aged woman with curly red hair stood up, “you know, in the woman’s restroom, we have two little containers of dishwashing soap, I think that worked well.”
         “And see, there you go,” said Adam, “and I bet there were no complaints.  Right there is the main problem, there is no standardization.  Who is responsible for sanitization and supply?”
         The woman in front cleared her throat, “well, there is no such a thing, you see, the school provides the facilities as a donation.”
         “I see,” said Adam diplomatically.  “Well, this is something we will have to take into our own hands.”
         “Here here!” I added, “new soap.”
         The fat man nodded in agreement.  Finally, now we were getting somewhere.
         
         Some more talking ensued; I wasn’t sure if it was about the soap.  I rested my head in my hands and watched Adam complete his Cancer Contra.  “I think he needs a sidekick.”
         “Sergeant Kickass rides alone,” said Adam.
         “Hm.”
         “You don’t look like you’re having fun.”
         “I am,” I lied.
         “Whatever.  Why even be here?  Why even raise money?  We both know it doesn’t matter.  For one, despite everything we do, some hospital tripled our three weeks of fundraising in a single check.  And second, you don’t even think it helps.  What is five-thousand, or fifty-thousand, or five-hundred-thousand dollars going to do?  You can’t cure cancer.”
         I looked at Adam for a long while.  I wasn’t sure if he was being serious.  I think he was.  “You know, I like to watch the survivors walk.  I think it brightens people’s day.  Just a little.” 
         The corner of Adam’s mouth twitched slightly.
         “Wow, you are gay.”
         I shook my head.  “Whatever.  Everyone has a reason.  What is yours?”
         “I like being on committees.  It makes me feel important.”