Read The Yggyssey for Free Online

which was cooler than what I had said.
    "You dig sounds?" the kid said.
    I wasn't sure what that meant, but I took a chance.
    "Um, sure. I dig sounds."
    "Dig this," the kid said. He started drumming on the table with his stubby fingers. He drummed fast. There was no rhythm to it, just a lot of thumping on the table. It went on for a while. He was obviously caught up in it. Now and then I thought he was going to stop, but he kept on going, fast and slow, whacking different parts of the table. Finally, he came to the end.
    "Know what that was?" he asked me.
    "No."
    "That was Symphony Number Five by Ludwig Van Beethoven," he said. "That cat knew what was happening."
    "That's the first time I ever heard anybody drum a symphony," I said.
    "Yeah, well, I'm the only one who does it," he said.
    "It was good," I said.
    "It doesn't matter," the kid said. "Dig. We're just raccoons on the city dump of civilization."
    "I'm getting another cruller," I said.
    "Get me one too," the kid said. "You got bread?"
    "Bread?"
    "Money."
    "Oh, like dough! Yes, sure." I went to the window and got two crullers.
    "My name is Yggdrasil Birnbaum," I said when I got back.
    "Crazy," the kid said.
    "What's your name?"
    "They call me Bruce Bunyip." Bruce Bunyip stuffed the cruller into his face, getting crumbs all over his black sweater. Then he started drumming again. "You dig Diz?" he asked me.
    "Diz? Dizzy Gillespie?"
    "Yeah. You dig Diz?"
    "I dig Diz."
    "Cool. You dig Bird? Charlie Parker?"
    "I dig him."
    "Crazy. You wanna be my girlfriend?"
    "I'll think it over," I told Bruce Bunyip.

CHAPTER 17

Sleepover Mary
    I got invited to one of the famous sleepovers thrown by Mary Margaret Finklestein. Mary Margaret Finklestein is a girl at Harmonious Reality. Her father is some kind of big wheel in the movie business, and they live in a big house in Beverly Hills. Naturally, I wanted no part of it, but my mother persuaded me to go. She said I ought to have normal friends, and do normal activities. She said I needed socialization. "You don't want to be maladjusted," she said.
    I
do
want to be maladjusted.
    So I turned up at Mary Margaret Finklestein's house. Also attending the sleepover were Meg, Madge, and Peggy. Meg and Peggy are Harmonious Realitarians, and Madge is a girl Mary Margaret knows from her bullfighting class. This bullfighting class I know about. It takes place in the backyard of a music school on Beverly Boulevard. I've seen it. You go down this little alley next to the music school, and there is this dirt yard, all fenced in. There are two of these little short fencelike things at either end of the yard—they're to duck behind to protect yourself when the bull charges you. The bull, in this case, is a set of horns mounted on a bicycle wheel, with handles like a wheelbarrow. Someone runs at you with the wheelbarrow-bicycle-bullhorns thing, and you wave the cape around and dodge the horns. No actual bulls are employed. I asked Mary Margaret if she planned to go down to Mexico sometime and do some genuine bullfighting. She said the bullfighting class was just to develop poise, grace, and confidence. She said that she would never hurt a living bull. I told her it was more likely that the bull would do the hurting.
    Madge, Mary Margaret's fellow matadora, had round glasses and braces, and drooled when she talked, so she had to keep sucking spit between words.
    Madge got cheese in her braces when we had our first sleepover treat—pizza pie. I had heard of pizza pie because of "That's Amore," the Dean Martin song, which was on the radio all the time, but I didn't actually know what it was. The song says that when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, you're in love, which makes no sense. I always pictured the pizza pie as being something like a cream pie. It's round, but it does not resemble any pie I ever saw—it is not a dessert, it does not contain fruit, it does not have a top crust and a bottom crust. It's more like thin, crusty