Storymakers: Rosco, Pressure Cookers, and Cardboard Poets

Storymakers: Rosco, Pressure Cookers, and Cardboard Poets

By Noah
Seventh Grade
Billings Middle School
Seattle, WA

My name is Lorenzo Waters the III. My friends call me Lozo. I'll let you know when you can call me Lozo.

My parents split up when I was nine. My dad lives in a twelve room Victorian style mansion, with two pools. I spend most of my time in my mom's dumpy apartment. I like it. It has...It has...Character. It feels like a friend. A living, breathing, person. Scratch that. A living, breathing, inanimate object. Named Rosco. You see, our landlady is a bit of a loon, so instead of giving the apartment numbers, she gave them names. Ours is Rosco, the one next to us is Hildegard. How strange.

I don't know. My life is very strange. Stranger than books that line my walls. Old books, out of print books, first edition books. All bought for under ten dollars at thrift stores. You see my yellow converse high-top sneakers? Six dollars and thirty four cents, with tax. I collect odd things from thrift stores, and they cover any open wall space, tables, or any flat or semi-flat surface. Then I had to cover my ceilings after I ran out of room, then I started hanging things from the ceiling from fishing wire. I'm trying to figure out where to display things next. I organize them obsessively, at one point alphabetically by the third letter in the name of the object. That sure took a while. Right now they are organized chronologically by patent date.

So, anyway, back to the books. I really like the old science books that predict the future in technology, and end up being absurdly wrong. I'm also quite fond of books in other languages, and I have learned bits and pieces of different languages.

My favorite book of all time that I own, that I bought for forty-nine cents, is a first edition book signed by Harper Lee. But it is not actually written by her. It is "101 Things to Do With a Pressure Cooker" by Calvin Sorlin. Go figure.

A bunch of collectors keep offering to buy it off me. One once offered three hundred dollars and a bible from the 1800's. Not interested. I like it. It's not for sale. 500 dollars? Thanks, but no thanks.

So, yeah, my books are weird. But all my stuff is. Another personal favorite is an old stock ticker that someone scribbled "HeLIO-MY nAme is LoZO.!" People always say, "Nah, you must have written it on there." But I swear on my Harper Lee pressure cooker book that I did not. I have this weirdo friend named Star, and she's all new-agey. She thinks that fate and karma led me to find that stock ticker hidden behind all those jigsaw puzzles missing 60 percent of all the pieces. I'm not sure I believe here, but it makes a good story.

Star is my best friend. She says that fate and karma led us to meet each other, but I just saw her hidden behind all the preps in the school missing 60 percent of any personality. She is pretty funny, and only goes to the classes she feels like. Which is say, lunch and art class. Her parents are also pretty chill, so they don't really care. Luckily, I also take art class and lunch, so I see her every day. Every morning, when I arrive at school, groggy and tired, she is always sitting outside, barefooted, giving tarot readings to anyone who will listen. She's not your average hippie, though. She still likes lying in front of tanks and what have you, but she also enjoys the occasional pop record, ("Just David Bowie, everything else is mainstream crap"). She says that she was there when Lennon was shot, ("Didn't that happen in the eighties?" "I was there in spirit." "Oh, of course."). So, yeah, she's about as weird as me. She always gives me lists of records that say things when spun backwards, then I go look for them at the thrift store, and if I find them we listen to them backwards on her turntable while drinking chai tea and burning incense that is make to smell like "calm". I'm still not sure what calm smells like, but if anyone would know, it would be Star.

These are my other friends:

• Tanner

Yeah, that's it. Tanner's my other friend. Star and I met Tanner at a new age grocery store. He was getting organic watermelon wheatgrass guava juice. He and Star became friends instantly because of the similarities in their taste in...Everything. Gradually I came to like him too. I found out that he likes old comic books, and while those aren't really my thing, I was able to point him in the direction of a thrift store with a huge pile of comic books. So every weekend we all go to the huge goodwill, I look for junk, he looks for comic books, and Star performs séances for all the cashiers. Like I said, really, really, weird.

Whenever I go over to Tanner's room, which is really a garden shed in the backyard of his house, he always has a big tub of paint and brushes out. And every time, we always paint a sentence, a quote, or lyric onto his walls. Once they are overlapping, he paints over everything in white. And starts over. My last contribution was "How does the cardboard poet attach to a solicitor?" He tries not to repeat but every time he paints the wall white again, he always writes "rambunctious Ramsy knows too much." He doesn't even know how he got it, or why he likes it so much. Enter Star with "Fate and Karma, of course!"

Those two words, which I now hear every day, used to be new to me. So did watermelon juice gunk. Friends will do that to you. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Fate and Karma, Karma and Fate.

Storymakers: A Creative Challenge for Young Writers, is a program inviting students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades living in Washington State and British Columbia, Canada, to submit their own original creative writing pieces.