I
INVITATION
JONBOAT SAY
GROWING UP, I’D HEARD, “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” a couple or three times a week from my father. The piehole thats shutting he’d demand was rarely mine, though. It usually belonged to someone well outside shouting range—as frequently a radio or television newsman as a bested foe in a dinner table anecdote of everyday interpersonal victory—and never to my mother. She’d never been a cakeface. Not to my father or me at least. Nor had she ever used the saying herself, and, after she was gone, I wondered what, if anything, that might have meant. Except for when she’d hear it from my father’s mother, who’d put a bite behind the piehole that somehow made it sharper than whatever slur the cakeface was being used to euphemize, the saying seemed always to incite her to smile, yet I may have been too young to distinguish true amusement from motherly indulgence. I may have been too young to tell a smile from a smirk.
Come to think of it, I can’t recall my mother ever smirking.
But all of this to say that while Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason, by eventually having made it his catchphrase, popularized “Shut your piehole, cakeface,” it had been ours first. My family’s. We Magnets’. He learned it from me.
There used to be a couple of tetherball courts in the middle of the playground next door to our house, and one day, around the start of seventh grade, Blackie Buxman and I were facing off on one of them, playing best-of-nine for a soda and chips, when Jonboat, who’d moved to town a week earlier, declared his intention to challenge the winner. Buxman wouldn’t rob liquor stores for years yet. He was, at that time, our school’s starting pitcher and basketball center. I lacked strength and was average of stature. My competitive streak was the width of a noodle. Having grown up so close to the playground, however, I dominated foursquare and tetherball the both. Blackie must have forgotten, or maybe never known. When I beat him five-zip, he evinced disbelief. He said, “No way,” then spoke to me rudely. “Go assfuck a swingset, you psycho,” he said.
That cut me a little, but I came back fast. I said, “Fetch me my cold Cherry Coke and Pringles. In the meantime, though, shut your piehole, cakeface.”
Jonboat laughed.
The crowd around the court took a couple steps back, alarmed and confused. I possessed at that time a fair-size, however provisional measure of blacksheepish cool, and so was someone who’d have normally been able to get away with wising off to Buxman in response to a slight—it would have looked like we were riffing—but Jonboat’s laughter bent the social calculus. No one quite understood where he fit yet. Girls seemed to like him. He was certainly big. His father was Jon “Jon-Jon” Jason, and his granddad Hubert “All Hell” Pellmore. Nevertheless, Jonboat was the new kid; the new, rich, blond kid. He didn’t have friends, or we were, all of us, his friends—none of us were sure. For all we knew, Jonboat was too blond and rich—was that a thing? It seemed like it could be and it seemed like it couldn’t. Did he have the right to laugh at Blackie’s expense, though? And if he had the right to laugh at Blackie’s expense, did I have the right to get credit for his laughter? Did Blackie Buxman have to save face?
Blackie thought he did. So it was Jonboat or me. Someone had to hurt. I was the easy choice, and Blackie liked it easy, simple as that. He stepped in my direction. Jonboat shoved him sideways. Blackie reached for Jonboat, and Jonboat smashed his nose.
“You’ll pay,” Blackie said.
“Shut your piehole-cakeface, gaylord,” said Jonboat.
Blackie loped home without buying me snacks. Jonboat roundly defeated me at tetherball—five to three—and took me out for pizza. We were friendly for a while, though not really friends til a few months later when he beat me up at school.
* * *
After spending a semester using “piehole” as a modifier and pushing back the comma so the saying could abide the direct address “gaylord,” Jonboat—who’d by then taken Blackie’s starting spot at center, gotten to third with a sitcom ingénue at a party at the White House over winter break, and become, hands down, the goldenest goldenboy in Wheelatine Township, perhaps in all the greater Chicagolandarea—realized, I think, that even as “Shut your piehole-cakeface, gaylord” had entered the everyday parlance of our school, it was ineradicably branded Jonboat, and thus he felt free to change it up. I’d heard versions ranging from G- to X-rated. “Stuff your greasehole-fryface, burgerking.” “Hide your oofhole-bruiseface, punchingbag.” “Plug your stinkhole-assface, widehind.” “Wipe your meathole-lipsface, cumdump.” Etcetera. All versions got laughs, though none beat the original—at least not to my taste—and, ultimately, I think I felt flattered to have had my family’s best saying appropriated by someone as handsome and affable as Jonboat. It helped, too, that he acknowledged my role in the process. When, just before Easter, he came up with the idea to add “Jonboat Say” to the front of the catchphrase and put it on T-shirts, he consulted me directly, and accepted nearly all the advice I gave. All of it except for one small piece, which eventually, though indirectly, caused the brief spasm of trouble between us.
We both agreed the T-shirts should be all-cotton and Superman red. We agreed that the image Jonboat had drawn—a balding and openmouthed fatman’s head (colossal uvula, flappy underchin fold) beside a disembodied hand and a motion-line array expressing an imminent, four-fingered slap—should be printed on the chest below “Jonboat Say” and above the catchphrase. We agreed that the lettering should look like it had the texture of spray paint, that the image should be black on a square white background, and that “gaylord” shouldn’t appear on the shirt, as “gaylord” would make it unwearable at school. I, however, was of the opinion that, absent “gaylord,” the comma should be restored to its original position between “piehole” and “cakeface,” whereas Jonboat claimed restoring it would ruin the shirt. He said that, first of all, with a comma before “cakeface,” the shirt would have to be considered “officially punctuated,” which would require a period be placed after “cakeface,” not to mention a colon, if not another comma, after “Jonboat Say,” and quotation marks around the catchphrase itself, i.e.,
JONBOAT SAY:
[almost-slapped fatman image]
“SHUT YOUR PIEHOLE, CAKEFACE.”
This, believed Jonboat, was more punctuation than a T-shirt could abide.
Secondly, he explained that, as his use of the saying had long since demonstrated, he thought it sounded better without the comma; that commanding a person to shut his piehole-cakeface was stronger than just commanding some cakeface to shut his piehole. With that I disagreed, though not too heartily, and I kept my opinion to myself. But I did suggest that a hyphen be placed between “piehole” and “cakeface” in order to really bring across the compoundedness of the two already-compound words. Jonboat wasn’t sure. He thought a hyphen might suggest “official punctuation,” giving rise to the problem that ditching the comma had already solved. Then again, it might not. A hyphen might be more like a spelling thing—more like an apostrophe. We briefly tossed around the idea of making “piehole(-)cakeface” a single word, i.e. “pieholecakeface,” but it looked like Italian spelled by a Slav, and we figured that even if readers of the shirt could recognize “pieholecakeface” as English, they were bound to be confused about where the stresses fell. And so we were back to do- or don’t-hyphenate.