I Am Not Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos

Author:Jack Gantos [Gantos, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429935784
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2007-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

9

GRANNY’S COMET

I had been collecting cigarette butts for some time because I was looking forward to visiting my grandmother’s grave. She died a year ago after fifty years of smoking what she figured was fifty thousand packs of cigarettes, enough that if you stacked the cigarettes end to end you would have a cigarette tower over sixty-eight miles high so that if you climbed up and sat on top of it you would actually be in outer space breathing from a tank of oxygen—and that’s how she ended her life, breathing out of a tank of oxygen, but instead of being in outer space looking down at me she is underground looking up at me. Still, I’d rather have her here on earth than have to search the universe through a telescope as if she were a comet exhaling a little trail of cigarette smoke across the starry sky. Once, I was watching TV and they showed an aerial view of a forest fire raging out of control on either side of a highway and I yelled toward the kitchen where she was cooking, “Come here quick and see what your lungs look like!”

She glanced at the flames on the TV then glared down at me. “That’s what your bottom is going to feel like when I smack you with this frying pan.”

She never took criticism well, but I loved her and wanted to do something special, so that’s why I collected the cigarette butts and bottle caps and bits of foil plus I had found a spray can of silver paint in the diner tool closet. I figured it might work like spray-on tinsel so I added it to my bag of supplies, which also included a big tube of Super Glue.

It was sad that Granny was dead but I was happy with my tombstone plan as I walked the few miles from the diner down highway 30 toward St. Mary’s Cemetery, which was right behind our old house where I had hit my head.

Tall Amish buggies clip-clopped by me like wooden outhouses on wagon wheels. I waved to the people sitting bundled up inside and they waved and smiled back, which was nice because I had a huge wool knit Christmas cap stretched down over my ears so my head was the shape of an enormous acorn. They could have pointed and laughed at me but they didn’t because they were Amish, which meant they were always polite. Although the other day Dad pointed at some Amish kids downtown who were staring at a really fancy car. “The young ones can’t always live up to being Amish,” he said. “There is a bunch of them that have secret apartments and cars and go out drinking and looking for non-Amish girlfriends. You can be trapped inside your own skin and sometimes you just want to rip it off and be someone different.”

Even though he was talking about them, I knew he was really talking about himself. He always seemed to be two people at once and I wasn’t sure why.

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