The Books: “The Pigman” (Paul Zindel)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA fiction:

Next book on the shelf is The Pigman by Paul Zindel.

Okay, I always get a bit nervous when I pull a book off the shelf that not only do I love – but I feel has made some kind of huge impact on me. I felt it when I pulled out Ballet Shoes the other day, and when I pulled out Harriet the Spy I felt an almost hesitance, like: “Maybe I’ll skip this one …” Just because it means so much to me that I feel like it’ll be hard to ‘go there’, in terms of describing it. It gets personal. A lot of these books, as much as I love them, aren’t personal. But The Pigman certainly is.

All I can say is – I first read this book for school – in 8th grade – when I was in the middle of one of the worst times of my life. I was a social outcast, my clothes were wrong, I was teased within an inch of my life by a bunch of bitchy girls – to the point where they put signs on my back saying “I’M UGLY” and would crank-call my house, ask for me, and when I came on the phone say, “Hi … REALLY loved your pants today.” I’d hear shrieks of laughter in the background, and I’d hang up, trembling with shame. I didn’t tell my parents about any of this – it seemed like it was just something that had to be endured. I had good friends but I didn’t have classes with any of them (although I did end up becoming friends with Mere in 8th grade math – the teacher of which is an entire post in and of itself … But onward!!). Life was a howling wilderness. Well, except for Ralph Macchio. I’m dead serious. I was 13 years old and I was really suffering. From such self-loathing that I still struggle with it today – and also a low-level constant fog of depression. I had been well liked in grade school. Adolescence hit me completely unprepared. I was like a foreign exchange student who hadn’t learned the language yet. I was a mess. Instead of fighting back, or adjusting my behavior, I just sank into a passive “let me just get through this” mentality, which was horrible. I should have punched Phyllis. I won’t say her last name, but I know who she is. I should have punched her in her fucking mouth. That would have shut her up. I took her abuse for 2 years in a row because our last names were close, alphabetically – and I never fought back. Ridiculous. Oh, and here’s the ironic thing: EVERYONE has a horrible time in junior high. I only learned this much later, of course. I thought I was the only one who had a hard time getting thru the day. Everyone struggles – maybe some people have a better game-face, or maybe some people enjoy figuring out the rules of the game and then playing the game everyone else is playing – but that doesn’t mean that there’s no struggle. It was just me, in my isolation, at the time. I didn’t understand this new society, I couldn’t get the rules straight, I kept messing up, and I would not be forgiven for my clothes.

So, Hmmm. What does all this have to do with The Pigman? Everything. These are the kids that Paul Zindel writes for. He writes for the kids in those situations. He knows that teenagers feel isolated from not only each other, but the world itself. He knows that adolescence is (for some) a howling wilderness, especially if you have a horrible home life. NOBODY does horrible home life quite like Paul Zindel. (Uhm – Effect of Gamma Rays??)

I LOVE his writing and I have many of his books … there are still some that I am missing, which I really should rectify. His themes are always similar – it’s always teenagers – faced with some struggle – but then, through heartache, usually, having a deep revelation about themselves and the world. It’s usually about teenagers being forced to come out of their self-absorption and care about another human being. Or see that they are not the only person in the world. But as anyone who, well, is DEEP understands: growth like that rarely happens in a neat tied-up-in-a-bow way. A lot of times we learn these lessons in life the hard way. We need to be bashed over the head. We need to be shamed. We need to lose something, and BIG, before we really ‘get it’. Those are the moments that Paul Zindel writes about … over and over and over. Some of these moments you can never take back, even though you want to so badly. Paul Zindel’s characters really suffer.

And yet – on the flipside – these books are soooooooo funny. I remember when we were all in Ireland as a family – I was about 14 – and I think I was reading the book outloud to Jean. We were in a B&B, and the kids were in one room, my parents in another. I got to the part about The Marshmallow Kid – and I started laughing so hysterically, and so loudly that first of all – I could no longer keep on reading, and second of all – my mom had to come down the hall and tell us to be quiet. The same thing happened when I read a chapter of it outloud to my roommate Jen – on September 10, 2001. Weird. The things you remember. Or maybe it’s not weird. We lay in her bed, in her breezy bedroom next to mine, and I started to read to her – and eventually began snorting and crying and guffawing – These books are FUNNY.

He’s one of my favorite writers.

The Pigman is the story of John and Lorraine – and how they befriend (under false pretenses) a man in their neighborhood (which is on Staten Island, I believe) named Angelo Pignati. John and Lorraine are two mis-matched people to be friends – and they get into a lot of trouble together. John is as good-looking as a movie star. He has a horrible home life. Kind of like Ally Sheedy’s in The Breakfast Club. “What do they do to you?” “They ignore me.” John feels invisible. So he becomes this insane trouble-maker at school. The book opens with him telling us, the reader, about how he used to set off little bombs in the boy’s bathroom at school. They called him “The Bathroom Bomber”. Also how he would organize his entire math class to roll big apples down the aisles between their desk at a given signal. So the teacher would suddenly turn around and see apples careening towards him. Etc. John is cocky, smart, kind of a loner – he smokes, he drinks – he hangs out in the cemetary with his hoodlum friends – He wants to be an actor, but that’s mainly because he knows he’s gorgeous. But … you just ACHE with love for this character, eventually. He’s funny, he’s insane, you never know what he’s going to do … so the ending of the book packs a huge punch. John has to become a man. Way too soon. He’s not ready. But he has to. Lorraine needs him to. It hurts. He has lost a lot – and he will have to live for the rest of his life knowing that HE was partly the cause of that tragedy.

Anyway, so that’s John.

Lorraine, when I first read this book in 8th grade, reminded me of me. She was goofy-looking – her clothes were never right – she was a new kid in school, and she had no friends. She just didn’t fit in. She felt like a fat galumphing ugly beast … and her mother reinforces this skewed self-image. Her mother is a single mom – I guess the dad walked out on them – and her mother works as a private nurse for dying people – and most of them are dirty old men who try to pinch her ass. Her mother HATES (and I mean HATES) men. She tries to pass along this “wisdom” to Lorraine. “Boys are only after one thing. Never forget that.” She makes Lorraine dress a certain way, so as not to attract boys – who are only after one thing – and, in general, makes Lorraine into a paranoid nervous wreck. Lorraine truly believes that all men are sex maniacs who cannot control themselves … so when she meets John – who may be like that with other girls, slutty girls – but isn’t that way with her – she is suspicious of him. And she is sure that Mr. Pignati, the sweet little old man, is up to no good and is about to rape her at any moment.

Anyway, the form of the book is part of the fun. Here’s the set-up: John and Lorraine have decided to write a book, telling “their side” of the story about what happened with Mr. Pignati – since everyone is running around thinking the worst of them. As you start the book, you have no idea what the ending is … but John and Lorraine write their chapters in such a way that you are prepared. They say stuff like: “We honestly didn’t mean it. We didn’t mean for all of that to happen.” You don’t know what they’re talking about – but you know that it’s coming.

It’s great, too, because their two narrative voices are completely different. John is kind of cocky, and bragging about stuff – while Lorraine frets and worries – and comments on the writing in John’s chapter. “I knew I shouldn’t have let John write the first chapter. He has a tendency to exaggerate.” Actually, they both comment on each other’s chapters. They correct each other, defend themselves against attack from the other, etc.

Lorraine, also, has obviously been OD-ing on the self-help books. You’ll see what I mean in the excerpt below.

Through an afternoon of crank-calling – John and Lorraine end up talking to a lonely-sounding guy named Mr. Pignati who actually invites them, his crank callers, over after school the following day. Terrified, but thinking that maybe they can scam him (see? John and Lorraine are total trouble when they are together) – they go over there. Mr. Pignati lives in a dusty dark house – with the shades drawn. He is, to put it mildly, eccentric. He invites them in. He is lovely, doddering, imaginative – he makes them play little word games – because it’s all just so delightful to meet new people and isn’t it fun to play games? John and Lorraine feel awkward, and … somehow they succumb to this man. They begin spending all of their time therer after school, hanging out with Mr. Pignati. They tell no one because they think that people might think it weird that they like hanging out with an 80 year old dude, who spends all his time at the zoo, bonding with one gorilla in particular. They go to the zoo with him, and are kind of embarrassed to watch how Mr. Pignati speaks, intimately, to the gorilla through the glass. They have BONDED. Mr. Pignati is kind of nuts.

But it turns out that Mr. Pignati has a secret. John and Lorraine discover it.

And they end up betraying Mr. Pignati. He learns of this betrayal – he looks them in the eyes – his new friends who have brightened up his lonely days – and realizes that they have lied to him. And the repercussions are devastating. Things happen that can never be undone.

It’s a FANTASTIC book – and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I will always love it because I remember my sensation when I first read it – in the horrible howling wilderness that was adolescence: Someone gets me. This writer gets me. He knows what it’s like!

It was unbelievably comforting.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Lorraine’s chapters – in fact, it’s an excerpt from the first chapter Lorraine writes, where she races in and tries to correct all of John’s exaggerations and lies. Oh yeah – John is a brilliant and compulsive liar. Notice Lorraine’s unremitting psychobabble. She’s describing how they met and became friends – a CLASSIC scene.

Excerpt from The Pigman by Paul Zindel.

The one big difference between John and me, besides the fact that he’s a boy and I’m a girl, is I have compassion. Not that he really doesn’t have any compassion, but he’d be the last one on earth to show it. He pretends he doesn’t care about anything in the world, and he’s always ready with some outrageous remark, but if you ask me, any real hostility he has is directed against himself.

The fact that I’m his best friend shows he isn’t as insensitive to Home sapiens as he makes believe he is, because you might as well know I’m not exactly the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m not Venus or Harlow. Just ask my mother.

“You’re not a pretty girl, Lorraine,” she has been nice enough to inform me on a few occasions (as if I didn’t remember the first time she ever said it), “but you don’t have to walk about stoop-shouldered and hunched.” At least once a day she fills me in on one more aspect of my public image – like “your hair would be better cut short because it’s too kinky,” and “you’re putting on too much weight,” and “you wear your clothes funny.” If I made a list of every comment she’s made about me, you’d think I was a monstrosity. I may not be Miss America, but I am not the abominable snowwoman either.

But as I was saying, it is a facat that John has compassion deep insideo f him, which is the real reason we got involved with the Pigman. Maybe at first glance John thought of it all simply as a way of getting money for beer and cigarettes, but the second we met th eold man, John changed, even though he won’t admit it. As a matter of fact, it was this very compassion that made John finally introduce himself to me and invite me for a beer in Moravian Cemetery. He always went to Moravian Cemetery to dirnk beer, which sounds a little crazy, but it isn’t if you explore his source problem a bit. Although I didn’t know John and his family until two years ago when I moved into the neighborhood, from what I’ve been able to gather I think his father was a compulsive alcoholic. I’ve spent hours trying to analyze the situation, and the closest I’ve been able to come to a theory is that his father set a bad example at an age when John was impressionable. I think his father made it seem as though drinking alcoholic beverages was a sign of maturity. This particular sign of maturity ended up giving his father sclerosis of the liver, so he doesn’t drink anymore, but John does.

I had moved into John’s nneighborhood at the start of my freshman year, and he and a bunch of other kids used to wait for the same bus I did on the corner of Victory Boulevard and Eddy Street. I was in a severe state of depression the first few weeks because no one spoke to me. It wasn’t that I was expecting the boys to buzz around and ask m e out, but I was sort of hoping that at least one of the girls would be friendly enough to borrow a hairpin or something. I stood on that corner day after day with all the kids, and nobody talked to me. I made believe I was interested in looking at the trees and houses and clouds and stray dogs and whatever – anything not to let on how lonesome I felt inside. Many of the houses were interesting as far as middle-class neighborhoods go. In fact, I suppose you’d say it was a multi-class neighborhood because both the houses and the kids ranged from wrecks to rich. There’d be a lovely brick home with a lot of land, and right next to it there’d be a plain wooden house with a postage-stamp-sized lawn that needed cutting. The only thing that was completely high class was the trees. Large old trees lined most of the streets and had grown so tall and wide they almost touched. I loved looking at the trees more than anything at first, but after a while even those started to depress me.

Then there was John.

I noticed him the very first day mainly because of his eyes. As I told you, he has these fantastic eyes that take in everything that’s going on, and whenever they came my way, I looked in the other direction. His eyes reminded me of a description of a gigantic Egyptian eye that was found in one of the pyramids I read about in a book on black magic. Somehow an archaeologist’s wife ended up with this huge stone eye in her bedroom, and in the middle of the night it exploded and a big cat started biting the archaeologist’s wife’s neck. When she put the lights on, the cat was gone. Only the pieces of the eye were scattered all over the floor. That’s what John’s eyes reminded me of. I knew even from the first moment I saw him he had to be something special.

Then one day John had to sit next to me on the bus because all the other seats were taken. He wasn’t sitting there for more than two minutes before he started laughing. Laughing right out loud, but not to anyone. I was so embarrassed. I wanted to cry because I thought for sure he was laughing at me, and I turned my head all the way so the only thing I could see out the window of the bus was telephone poles going by. They call that paranoia. I knew that because some magazine did a whole article on mental disturbances, and after I read the symptoms of each of them, I realized I had all of them – but most of all I had paranoia. That’s when you think everybody’s making fun of you when they’re not. Some extremely advanced paranoiacs can’t even watch television because they think the canned laughter is about them. Freud would probably say it started with my mother picking on how I look all the time. But no matter how it started, I’ve got to admit that when anyone looks at me I’m sure they’re noticing how awful my hair is or I’m too fat or my dress is funny. But I did think John was laughing at me, and it made me feel terrible, until finally – and the psychiatrists would say this was healthy – I began to get mad!

“Would you mind not laughing,” I said, “because people think I’m sitting with a lunatic.” He jumped when I spoke to him, so I realized he wasn’t lauhging at me. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

“I’m sorry,” he said. I just turned my head away and watched the telephone poles some more. Then I heard him whisper something under his breath, and it had just the tone of a first-class smart aleck.

“I am a lunatic.”

I made believe I didn’t hear it, but then he said it again a little louder.

“I am a lunatic.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go around bragging about it,” I said, and I was so nervous I dropped one of my books on the floor. I was mortified picking it up because it fell between the seat and the window, and I was sure I’d look like an enormous cow bending over to get it. All I could think of at that moment was wishing one of his eyeballs would explode and a nice big cat would get at his neck, but I managed to get the book and sit straight up with this real annoyed look on my face.

Then he started that laughing thing again. Veru quietly at first, and boy, did it burn me! And then I decided I was going to let out a little laugh, so I did. Then he laughed a little louder, and I laughed a little louder, and before I knew what was happening I couldn’t stand it, so I really started laughing, and he started laughing, and we laughed so much the whole bus thought we were out of our minds.