The Bionic Teen

by Jacques Debrot

An elite team of talent scouts from the ABC network had been roaming the lower 48 in a silver stretch limo. They were searching for The Bionic Teen, my uncle told me excitedly. He’d watched a celebrity news feature about it on The 700 Club. Donny Osmand’s name had been bruited about, apparently. Bobby Sherman’s. But the network brass wanted a complete unknown. Apache Rock, just two hundred miles away, was the next stop on their itinerary. A huge horde of local boys was expected to show up. But my uncle was certain I would be given the part. “This is what we’ve been waiting for," he said, crushing his cigarette stub in the ceramic ashtray I’d made for him in the third grade. “It’s your destiny.” Years earlier, back when my uncle was still a rich man, he’d revealed to me that in a prophetic vision he’d witnessed a white-winged angel place a golden crown on my head. 

Three days later I drove with him to the Golden Girl Trailways stop where we stood together, for a few minutes before the bus arrived, under the water tower with the long-braided Indian Princess silhouette painted on it. It was five in the evening. The sky was a dreamy radioactive shade of purple, the desert summer heat incinerating.

“Call me when you get there,” my uncle said in a slurred voice, his face gaunt and ugly with a thousand creases, like a wrinkled paper bag. He’d been drinking since before noon and was visibly tipsy. Digging into the rear pocket of his raggedy plaid golf pants, he extracted a crinkled twenty-dollar bill. “It’s all the money I can spare,” he said. A bloody adhesive bandage was affixed to the jutting-out knuckles of his deeply tanned hand where Godzilla, one of the monstrous Australian emus we were raising for bird steaks, had torn into it the week before. I took the money and thanked him. Then he stumbled back into his ancient Jaguar Mk and weaved away in a cloud of red dust.

The Trailways bus was hot as an oven. I made my way to the back with a shopping bag crammed with my belongings and took the last empty seat next to a blind cowboy with a wide grim smile like a carved pumpkin. Right away, he asked if I had a cigarette on me.

I told him I didn’t smoke. 

“Good for you. Nasty habit.” He licked his lips and said that he was riding all the way to Sin City to play the slots at Harrah’s. They had special machines there for the blind, he explained. When you dropped your coins in, Ray Charles sang “America the Beautiful”. According to him, if you were enough of a sucker, you could play blackjack and poker with braille cards nowadays, but he didn’t trust the dealers as far as he could spit. “Thieves and flimflammers,” he said. His eyes were milky white. He asked me if I’d ever been to Vegas. 

“Never,” I answered. I told him I was traveling to the big TV tryout in Apache Rock.

He shook his head. “Show business is just another category of gambling,” he said. Then he leaned close to me and asked if he could touch my face. “You must be a looker.”

I checked to see if the driver was peering at us in his side mirror. “Okay,” I answered.

He reached out and felt all around my eyes and mouth, smiling inscrutably and working his big jaw up and down. “You have fine features, indeed” he said. “Grecian, like those pagan statues in the museums.” His fingernails were long and yellow. “Those are zits under your nose, though, right, boy? No worries. We all have flaws.” 

When he was finished with my face I put on my headphones and listened to Captain & Tennielle’s new album on my Walkman. Outside, the Flinstones-esque scenery rolled by monotonously–a repeating loop of moon rubble, sand, and spindly cactus. Soon the motion of the bus began to make me sleepy. Apache Rock was still a couple of hours away, but I needed to stay awake. The bus made stops in East Lincoln, Devil’s Lake, and San Simon and I was afraid somebody might try to steal the shopping bag that I was guarding between my knees.  

By the time we reached Apache Rock, the blind man had passed out with his head bent to the side in a weird broken neck position. A thread of hanging drool oozed from his frozen smile. 

I hauled my shopping bag off the bus and looked around to get a fix on where I was. The street was deserted, not a soul in sight. It was like the aftermath of an apocalypse. Woozy heatwaves shimmered off the blazing pavement like some kind of poison vapor. 

Feeling a little rubber-legged after the long ride, I walked aimlessly around the downtown area until I came upon a bummy hotel with a dented vacancy sign and paid for a low-ceilinged room on the fourth floor. I was pleasantly surprised, however. The mustard-colored carpet looked clean enough and the sagging bed was a spacious full-size with a good smell. The only true drawback was that I had to share the bathroom down the hall with a sick old man in the neighboring room. Through the paper-thin walls I could hear him hacking and coughing like he was trying to drink a milkshake through his nose. 

I lifted my bag onto the bed, laid my clothes out on the musty slipcover, and tried on the half-dozen outfits I’d brought with me in front of the spotted bathroom mirror. Cigarette in hand, the sick man watched me through the open door of his room where he sat lumpily in a rattan wheelchair. He had diabetes, he told me, among several other deathly diseases, and said the doctors were threatening to cut off his legs. He kept coughing violently into his fist. “Magenta is a flattering color on you,” he croaked, offering me an unsolicited critique each time I traipsed past his open door. “I vote for the puffy shirt with the sequins.”   

As I’d feared, the disco pants I’d been hoping to wear were too tight around the waist, so I chose a pair of flare-legged bluejeans with a fat pink belt and paired it with a wrinkled sateen shirt that smelled faintly of corn chips. It was almost ten by then. The sun had gone down hours ago, too late to call my uncle. He was certain to be three sheets to the wind, in any case.  

I was still technically on the grapefruit diet he’d instructed me to adhere to forty-eight hours earlier, but I was suddenly ravenous. Fortunately for me there was an all-night diner open halfway down the block and I made a beeline there. A couple of people were sitting at the counter, but the place felt empty, so I took a seat at a big circle booth near the front window and ordered a Cracker Barrel Meatloaf from a willowy, ginger-haired waitress, along with a side order of shoestring fries and a large milk. It seemed like an unjustifiably extravagant expenditure, even in the moment, but I comforted myself with the thought that it would hold me until well into the next day.

Already I missed my uncle, but I was used to being on my own. My keen fashion sense had made me a kind of celebrity at my highschool. Every day I’d sport stretch velvet leisure suits, groovy platform shoes, gold chains, and chunky bracelets. Girls would follow me around like strays. When I walked into a room, heads would literally turn. But I had no real friends. 

“You’re a big eater," the waitress said in an interested voice. I’d chopped my food up into dozens of bite-size pieces so I wouldn’t wolf it down all at once, but there were still a couple of petite chunks of meatloaf left. The waitress put her elbows on the counter and watched me as I cleaned them off my plate. She was in her twenties, I guessed, a few years older than me, and as pale as an albino with a million freckles and a shiny pointed chin. “Where does it all go, sweetheat? Have you got a hollow leg or something?” 

“Fast metabolism,” I mumbled awkwardly, feeling my face and neck flush. I was sensitive about my weight. 

That night I dreamed of giant airborne parasitic blobs that enveloped and destroyed everything in their gooey path–skyscrapers, tanks, fighter jets. I woke up electrified in a near-panic and it seemed like hours passed before I was able to fall back to sleep. When I awoke again, hours later than I’d intended, the coughing man had entrenched himself in our shared bathroom.

My hair felt dirty, but with no time to spare, I threw on my clothes and hotfooted it out of the hotel as fast as I could. I knew I wouldn’t be among the early arrivals. But when I reached the dilapidated pre-war movie palace where the open audition was being held, the line of boys snaked seven long blocks all the way back to the jade green Chief Geronimo statue on Market Square. 

My heart plummeted. The line seemed endless to me and, to make matters worse, the heat was even more intolerable than the day before. A bank with a neon sign blinked the temperature, one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit. The only shade was under the stretched-out neck of Geronimo’s war horse Bad Medicine, but a pig-eyed boy with a hick hairdo and white doughy arms like bowling pins was sheltering in it.

“My name’s Woody,” he introduced himself. 

I ignored him, feeling almost insulted that somebody with zero chance of becoming the Bionic Teen was using up a place ahead of me. Miffed, I glared up and down the line and for a moment I was appeased. I didn’t think I had any competition.  

Still, the line barely seemed to creep forward. Soon my sateen shirt was soaked with sweat and the psoriasis on my scalp was tingling pins and needles. Woody, no doubt sensing my distress, offered me half a Snickers bar. I scarfed it down in no time and immediately demanded the remaining half. I was still hungry but at least I no longer felt as if I might pass out. Meanwhile a crowd of ordinary townsfolk had gathered to gawk at the freak show. “Good luck, pretty boy,” a passing motorist hooted at me.

I waved back in a friendly way. “Thank you,” I called out.

Woody darted his pig eyes in my direction. “I bet they pick you,” he smiled slyly. His front teeth were slightly overlapping

I thought about my uncle and shrugged. “A seer told me the same thing.” 

I think I would have bailed if the line had not suddenly picked up speed. As badly as I wanted to be the Bionic Teen I lacked discipline in those days. But inside of an hour, Woody and I had nearly reached the theater’s ostentatious front entrance. The talent scouts must have just been going through the motions by then, getting as many boys in and out of the building as quickly as they could. 

When it was my turn, a middle-aged woman with a Polaroid camera pointed it in my direction. “Say cheese,” she deadpanned and led me into a large mechanically refrigerated room, bright with fluorescent illumination. Two men and a woman were seated at the back behind a long shiny table. I was surprised not to see Lee Majors there. 

“How tall are you?” the man on the left asked. He was huge, three or four hundred pounds, it looked like. Cigarette smoke curled around his huge bald head.  

“Five-eleven and three-quarter inches.” 

“Stand on the mark,” the woman interjected, pointing a finger. She was seated at the center of the table, like somebody important. “Can’t you see it? It’s right there.” 

I looked down and spotted a red X taped to the floor a couple of feet in front of me.

“You look kind of fat,” the talent agent on the cranky woman’s right said. His voice was whiney and high-pitched. “That’s not a good look. How much do you weigh?”

“One-fifty,” I said.

The three sniggered. 

“Are you an athlete? What sports do you play?" the whiny talent agent asked. 

I lied again. “Football. Karate.”

“The Bionic Teen is a martial arts expert,” the woman said. 

The fat man shouted, “Let’s see you throw a punch, handsome.”

I performed a vague grunting martial arts move, then wound up and swung my fist wildly.

“Stop,” the fat man ordered. “Now look sad. Your pooch Fido is dead.”  

I scowled in his direction.

“Get back on the mark,” the woman said irritably.

“Over here?” 

“Back up,” the whiny-voiced man said. “That’s right. There.” 

Somebody clapped.

“Thank you,” the woman said abruptly. She turned to the open door and made a couple of little circular hand gestures like a traffic cop. “Next victim.” 

By then the last bus to Golden Girl had left more than an hour ago. If I skipped dinner I figured I’d have just enough cash to pay for another night at the hotel. Except for the Snickers bar, however, I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous evening. I had never gone an entire day without food. 

Hungry and a little desperate, I headed back to my hotel. It was a long walk. Before I got there, however, I found myself standing transfixed in front of the diner where I’d eaten the night before. For several long seconds I stared into the window as if through an invisible barrier, then went inside.

“Hello again,” the red-headed cashier said. She flipped a rag over her shoulder and smiled. “What would you like?”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, stinging with embarrassment. 

She gave me a long quizzical look. “Wait out back by the dumpsters,” she told me. “I get a break in a little while. I’ll bring you something then.”

“Hurry, please,” I said. 

Fifteen minutes later the red head showed up with a bag of Heap Big Beef Burgers. 

“I’ll trade you this for a kiss,” she said and held up the bag. Her freckled face was slick with sweat.

 I leaned over and, catching a corner of her hairnet with my lips, kissed her hot cheek. 

 "I was in line for the audition all day,” I said as she handed me the food. “They’re looking for a young Lee Majors. I believe I was born to play the part.”

“Are you an actor?”

 “I will be soon,” I said.

 “I believe you,” she said. She squeezed my arm. The smell of rotten garbage from the two dumpsters wavering in the heat hovered all around us. “I have to go now. Remember me when you’re a big star.”

Back home, everything had a weird haunted aura. It was as if I was seeing it for the last time—my uncle's enormous ramshackle mansion, our monstrous emus, the rundown chandeliered bedroom where I’d spent countless hours dreaming about my future. I thought about how, ever since I was a little boy, I’d wanted to be rich and famous, but I seemed to have lost my ambition.  

"Don’t let those Hollywood bigshots change you,” my uncle said after chugging down a tall jelly glass of cheap box wine at dinner. In the heat his Just For Men hair dye had rambled down his craggy cheeks like black tears onto the collar of his pink golf shirt. His old country club trophies filled an entire huge display case in the games room, but after contracting Parkinson’s he had gotten into channeling, crystals, and astrology. He was a great reader of Ayn Rand and Hal Lindsey. I used to hang on his every word. He poured himself another glass of wine, then, staring at me out of his gaunt, dead-looking face, told me that I would be leaving for Hollywood within the month.   

We recited a prayer together on our knees, then stood up again and watched Wheel of Fortune. When it was over I went outside and filled a couple of buckets with dry dog food and sunflower seeds and emptied them into the feed trough out behind the defunct marijuana garden as the emus crowded around me, flapping their shaggy brown wings and hissing like tigers. 

I put the bucket down under a giant Saguaro that looked like an alien Gumby, its outstretched cactus limbs raised in surrender. The sun was over the Golden Girl Mountains and in the distance I could hear the faint yodely cries of faraway coyotes. Soon the whole world would know my name, I thought. I was disconsolate. I had to fight back tears. I knew my uncle’s prophecy would come true. But I had never felt so brokenhearted.

Jacques Debrot's stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Nothing Short of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Stories, The Collagist, and Hobart. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and recently won The Thorn Prize in Fiction.