Bad Kid (11 page)

O
uch, you bitch!” screamed Greg as blood squirted against my fingers.

“I had to punch it in fast or it would never go through,” I said, popping the back of the piercing stud onto the earring. “Now let me put the alcohol on it.”

“Fuck,” Greg bellowed, the liquid soaking into his punctured earlobe.

“It'll get infected if I don't pour this on!”

“Well hurry up, asshole!”

“Mine hurt too, you pussy!” I barked as I shoved an ice cube against his ear.

You'd think that after two teenage boys admitted a long-kept secret about their sexuality to each other there would be some sort of tentative period, a span of time in which they'd be cautiously honest and play it cool. Nothing could've been farther
from the truth. Our coming out to each other was like opening a backed-up fire hydrant, releasing an unwieldy torrent of foul language, sex talk, and fashion experimentation. I stopped stifling my inclinations to wear eye shadow or paint my fingernails, because I no longer had to fear that they would out me to my best friend. Home manicures and Manic Panic hair-dyeing sessions ensued.

We stared at ourselves in the mirror, with brand-new silver studs in our ears. Greg looked at my reflection with a pleased smile.

“We. Look. So. Cool.”

“Right?” I answered. “These are awesome.”

Over the next few weeks, we encouraged each other to take bolder fashion risks. We didn't have detachable noses, but we could at least cut up our T-shirts and slice holes in the knees of Greg's expensive jeans.

“What are you doing?” Greg's confused mother asked one morning as we dug through the vegetable drawer of her fridge. “If you're hungry I can microwave you breakfast sandwiches.”

“We don't eat breakfast anymore,” we answered in sync, knowing we'd never look like David Bowie if we continued our morning diet of toaster strudel and Eggos.

“Found 'em!” Greg declared, removing the rubber bands from a bunch of asparagus and snapping them around his wrists. “Voilà, Mom! Bracelets!”

“Voilà?” she quietly repeated, confused as to what the big reveal was.

The next weekend, Greg's little brother walked into his room to find us precariously balancing on a chair beneath his ceiling fan.

“What are you doing in my room?”

“Chill! I'm taking your ceiling-fan chains,” Greg said as he jumped down.

“But how am I supposed to turn it on now?” Charlie asked.

“Just stand on a chair,” Greg shrugged as we snapped on our brand-new necklaces.

Afterward we went into the boys' bathroom, where Greg bent over and placed the side of his face against the counter. I combed his hair flat against the surface and sprayed it with Vidal Sassoon hairspray before blow-drying it on high heat.

“What the fuck?” Johnny screamed, standing in the doorway with a toothbrush in his hand. As I blasted Greg's hair with the blow-dryer, Johnny shook his head. “You're a pair of fucking weirdos!”

“Fuck you!” Greg yelled over the roar of the blow-dryer, a fine dander of crusted hairspray flaking into his burning eyes. “Ouch! It hurts, David!”

“But it's going to look great!” I asserted, beginning to understand that great fashion should probably be painful to achieve.

With our new piercings, matching half Mohawks, and D.I.Y. fashion accessories, we felt reborn. It was spring break, and these would be the looks to get us the pale-faced, club-going, slightly older, more world-weary boyfriends we'd been dreaming of. Because Greg and I could finally talk about boys, it seemed like they were everywhere, in greater numbers, especially in the North Star Mall food court. Eighteen-year-old jocks, thirty-year-old businessmen, and forty-year-old dads were all there to be ogled and mentally undressed. In the course of a three-hour lunch by the Chick-fil-A, Greg and I would have a dozen carefully narrated sexual relationships with men
of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Some guys were just the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am victims of our virtual, virginal blow jobs. Other men were unknowing participants in imaginary but meaningful long-term relationships. Most of them had sex with one or both of us in a hot tub, the kind of sex they would never forget. Although, in reality, we still weren't quite sure how all
that
worked.

“I bet that guy would be a good lay,” Greg said about a college-aged brunet in a polo shirt and glasses. “Look at his crotch, David!”

“Why are you always so into crotches?” I asked.

“Duh. Because that's where their dicks are!”

“But don't you want a small dick at first?” I reasoned. “Like, a starter dick or something?”

“But a big dick just seems better. Like getting a bigger slice of pizza.”

“Greg, it's not a meal. Besides, a giant penis doesn't mean he'll be a good boyfriend.”

Greg rolled his eyes and shoved a waffle fry in his mouth before spotting another boy. “Look at that one, David! In the blue tie.”

“Eww, Greg. He's old.” I recoiled from the ancient geezer. “Like, thirty-five at least!”

“Maybe I like them older,” Greg said, flashing me a devious smile and beginning to give a chicken nugget a mini–blow job.

“Greg,” I whispered, looking around to make sure people weren't watching. “Stop it!”

“It tastes so goooood,” he moaned, flicking his tongue around the edges of the nugget. I could feel my face getting hot; I was partially aroused, but also embarrassed that someone would see
Greg and know what we were. Being identified as freaks was one thing; being identified as queer was another.

“Greg, stop!” I insisted, shoving fries into my mouth as my nerves took hold.

“Bitch, I'm only—” Greg stopped midthought and stared over my shoulder.

“What?” I asked.

“One of them is coming over,” he whispered.

I turned to see a pale girl with a nest of fried hair approaching us from the freak encampment. She wore an oversize white T-shirt with a pentagram drawn on the chest and carried a metal lunch box covered in rust. Her short black skirt revealed long, fishnet-bound legs wrapped in two unlaced, dark-green combat boots. She flashed a look at Daphne over her shoulder before stopping at our table.

“Hi, boys,” she purred, looking directly at me.

I panicked.
What did she want from us? Why was she here? What would I say with a mouth full of waffle fries and ranch dressing that might impress her?

“Cool purse,” Greg said, gently snapping the produce rubber bands around his wrist.

She flashed us a completely unexpected grin, revealing two rows of perfect teeth behind glossy black lips. “It's awesome you knew what it was. People always call it a fucking lunch box.”

Anxiously forcing another fry into my mouth, I bleated, “Yeah, that's what I thought.”

“It's my fucking
purse
!” scolded the girl, glaring at me like Medusa. “My great-uncle died with this in his hands, fighting in World War II. Like, they had to pry this from his rigor-mortised grip in a blood-filled ditch. Okay?”

“Names for things are stupid. I hate labels,” said Greg, going into damage-control mode. As the girl scooped a handful of waffle fries from my plate, he calmly reasoned, “If it's a purse, it's a purse, right?”

“I think I can feel him in the air when I have this with me,” she said, sitting down as Greg flashed me a “be cool” look.

“Like, his ghost is in your lunch box?” I asked, unable to shut my mouth in spite of the waffle fries filling it.

“It's NOT a lunch box! It's a purse,” she yelled, slamming it onto the table as Greg jumped in to calm the situation.

“My name's Greg,” he blurted. “This is David.”

“My name's Raven,” she sighed.

I couldn't help but chuckle as Greg kicked me beneath the table and asked, “Um. Your name is—”

Before he could finish, the girl thrust her fist into the air and screamed her own name like a pro wrestler in the center of a WWF ring.

“I . . . Am . . . RAAAAA-VENNNNNN!!!”

Elderly women in wheelchairs choked on their baked potatoes. Parents reached out to shield their children's eyes. I wanted to tell the shoppers, “This is nothing, y'all. If you don't chill out, that other girl will take her nose off!”

Raven proceeded to devour my fries as she told us how much she loved writing poetry, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and female cartoon characters. As she rambled to Greg about how hard school sucked, I scanned her face and body, finally able to see this creature from the wild up close. I could see the thin layer of red polish left beneath the chipping layer of purple polish on her thumbnail. Looking closely at her eyeballs in profile, I could tell
that her irises were actually darker than I had thought, but covered in blue contact lenses. From a foot away I could smell the thick scent of funky herbs and musk coming off her body. As my gaze traveled up the back of her head, I realized that her thick, fried shrub of blue-black hair was wrapped around a yellowish stick that looked like a dog's rawhide bone.

“Raven. What's that in your hair?”

With a cold, dead stare she shoved a nugget between her charcoal-crusted lips and answered, “It's a human femur.”

She chewed at me for three seconds, her painted irises bulging from their sockets, daring me to challenge her. She gulped down her nuggets as the corner of her mouth started to twitch. Falling forward onto the table, she erupted in a giggling fit.

“Your face! That's fucking hilarious.” Just as quickly as she'd started laughing, she stopped. “No, but really. My brother got it, grave digging in Mexico.” And with that, she stood up. “All right, maybe we'll see each other at school Monday.”

I looked at Greg, confused.

“You go to Gunther?”

“Um, yeah. A lot of us sit under the oak tree in the courtyard at lunch. You probably just didn't notice me. This is my weekend look.”

She put her arm on her hip and struck a mannequin pose just as I noticed the safety pin through her earlobe. Suddenly there were ten black-smeared faces flanking her shoulders. A blond girl wearing a dog collar leaned forward and fingered our new Book of Love CD. She tapped the case with her chipped green fingernail and gave an approving nod.

“So good.”

“Hey everyone,” announced Raven as she smeared on a fresh stripe of black lip liner. “I just met these guys. They're cool.”

A limp murmur of lifeless hellos emanated from the group.

“This is Greg and David,” Raven continued, throwing her lip pencil into her lunch box and snapping it closed. “And they're meeting us next weekend at Club FX.”

I
n San Antonio in 1991 there were three alternative teen clubs: Changez with a
Z
, Phazez with two
Z
's, and Club FX. FX was out by the airport in an industrial park, a place no sixteen-year-old should be at night, let alone in a dog collar. Trying to seem cool, we'd pretended to know where FX was when we were invited. In an age before every middle-class home had Internet access, this was a problem.

“Greg, we can't just drive around here all night,” I said as we circled again through the same desolate maze of big-rig mechanics and barbecue-supply stores. “It's spooky.”

“But we can't give up,” Greg insisted. “See how great we look.”

Greg was in torn jeans, a paisley shirt, and a pale-gray vest adorned with band pins. Hanging off my shoulder was an oversize
sweater, the knit so worn you could see my Cure shirt underneath. My hair was gelled back into a ponytail the size of a thumbnail. We were both lightly dusted in a patina of translucent powder stolen from Greg's mother's vanity.

“Fine, David. We'll go back. This sucks.”

“I know,” I replied, bummed, but happy to know that Greg was all mine for the rest of the night. “Can you stop so I can pee?”

As I peed against the wall of a nursing-shoe factory, I took in the sounds of the night: distant traffic along the highway, a nest of baby birds in a farm-supply sign overhead, a plane landing over the horizon, the pumping bass line of “Bizarre Love Triangle,” a train's horn blaring . . . Wait.

“Hurry up,” Greg begged, nervously peering down the empty street. “It's freaky out here!”

“Shhh!” I said, stepping carefully back to the car with my finger over my lips. Greg frantically pulled a can of pepper spray from the glove compartment, yelling, “Who's out there? David! GET IN!”

“No! The music,” I said, turning off the car stereo as I jumped in the passenger seat. “I think I hear the club.” We drove toward the sound as I craned my head out the window like a family dog, but I couldn't hear the distant music over the little Cabriolet's motor. “Kill the engine!” Greg turned off the ignition and we cruised silently through the industrial park, two boys in eyeliner leaning out the windows of a tiny red car.

“David! I hear it,” Greg said as we rolled down a gentle decline at three miles an hour.

Greg started up the car and drove in the direction of the sound, through tiny backstreets lined with garbage heaps and
blank cement walls. But we'd lost the sonic trail. Greg killed the engine again and we poked our heads out the car windows, leaning into the night toward the sound of what would surely be an amazing discovery. Bored junkyard dogs stared silently at us through barbed-wire fences, as if they'd seen this kind of thing before and wanted to honor our quest.

And then they began to appear: creatures of the night walking along the sides of the road—seventeen-year-old girls with maroon bobs and nose rings, androgynous boys in sunglasses with Mohawks, tiny clusters of ghost-white kids wearing capes in earnest. Our people.

We parked in front of Bubba's Lonestar Propane as a cluster of witches in a cloud of clove smoke wafted past us. Greg turned to me and grabbed my hand.

“David, we did it!”

I smiled weakly at Greg, suddenly doubting that I was cool enough to be there.

“Tune in, Tokyo,” he said, lightly knocking on my forehead.

“Oh, sorry,” I apologized, grabbing the door handle to leave. “Sorry, Greg. Sorry . . .”

“Hey,” he said, grabbing my shoulder, “this is going to be fun. We are going to meet cool people and listen to awesome music. And your hair looks so cool like that, just like Keanu Reeves in
Dangerous Liaisons
! Don't be nervous,” he said, and rubbed my shoulder.

I knew that if I didn't kiss him right then and there I was the dumbest boy in the entire world. I leaned across the seat and closed my eyes. I hovered there with the emergency brake impaling my ribs, but nothing happened. I opened my eyes to find Greg staring intensely at his reflection in the visor mirror.

“Am I shining?” Greg turned to notice me leaning over the console a foot from his face. “Oh, sorry. Here you go,” he said, and passed me his CoverGirl compact. I dabbed at my face with the pad, feeling like a moron. I couldn't even flirt right.

Greg and I walked down the suddenly desolate street, empty plastic bags and pieces of cardboard blowing by in the wind. At the end of the block we came to the club, a one-story cinder-block building set up high on a subbasement support like a mobile home. We walked past a short cement wall into a big yard, where ghouls and freaks of all shapes and sizes leaned on rain-warped picnic tables, smoking cigarettes. I tripped on a step and almost fell, barely able to see with my sunglasses on.

“David!” Greg smacked my arm and made a peace-sign gesture with his fingers.

“Do you need scissors?” I whispered.

“No, nerd. Get me a cig!”

I fumbled through my pockets for our Marlboros and put two in my mouth as Greg sparked up his Zippo. I tried to light them, but the sunglasses made it difficult to gauge the distance of the fire from my face. I craned my head toward and away from Greg's lighter until I finally landed the tip of each Marlboro in the flame. As they ignited, I could momentarily see around us. A girl with severe black bangs in a miniskirt was sitting four feet away beside a Mohawked person of indeterminate gender wearing a necklace made of padlocks.

Completely nonplussed, Greg reached out for the cigarette without even looking at me, quietly murmuring, “Play it cool, David.”

Under a flood lamp at the club's porch entrance, two boys with safety pins through their lips smoked cigarettes. On the
other side of the door, two girls looked on as their pink-haired friend reenacted a fight. We walked up the half flight of stairs, where a large man in a black cap sat on a stool. He looked us up and down and grunted, “High tea?”

“Sorry, sir,” Greg said, lowering his sunglasses with concern. “What did you say?”

I leaned into Greg's ear and whispered, “Maybe it's code?”

“Oh! Like we have to go by ‘Dean' to enter or something?”

“Oh! Dean?” I replied, “I thought he was asking us if we wanted ‘high tea'?”

Behind us, an impossibly loud female voice bellowed into my ear. “Bitches, hurry up! Mama has to tinkle, cunts!”

I turned around to see a tiny, busty girl with a stark white face and a giant beauty mark on her cheek. She looked at me quizzically and let out a chortle. “Ha! Nice ponytail, Amadeus. Now can you pull out your fuckin' ID and compose your ass into this club!”

She flipped her bright-blue bobbed hair and flashed a giant Cheshire-cat grin as the people in line behind us laughed. Before I realized what was happening, her hand was plunging into my back jean pocket.

“Look, you silly bitches, the man needs your fuckin' IDs.”

“Get off!” I yelled, struggling to remove her hand from my pocket.

“I'm assuming there's a wallet in here, unless you forgot your purse.”

Greg tried to resist as she forced her other hand into his pants. “Excuse me, ma'am!”

“I ain't got all night for you two grandmas to adjust your hearing aids and I am not about to piss down the front steps of Club
RX or FX or Detox or whatever the fuck this shithole is called!” she complained, ripping our IDs from our wallets and handing them to the bouncer before storming toward the entrance.

“Miss,” the bouncer lazily requested, “ID?”

“Seriously? Oh goddamn, I just came out to smoke five minutes ago. Look at this mug!” she demanded, circling her face with black-painted fingertips. “I know you remember it 'cause it's damn near flawless, but the shit is clearly over fifteen years old. Fuck!”

The doorman handed us our IDs as we watched her disappear onto the crowded dance floor, cutting a furious path through sweaty, skinny teens like they were hanging vines in a jungle. On the ceiling were a few motorized lights, flashing bright-blue beams in time with the music. Beneath them were a hundred sweat-drenched kids who looked like junior morgue employees. They pouted, swayed, and writhed to a Nine Inch Nails song as it boomed from the three-foot-tall speakers on the floor.

“Come on,” yelled Greg, pulling me toward the throng of dancing bodies.

“Don't you wanna look around?” I yelled. “Maybe get a soda or something?”

“No! I want to dance!”

“But,” I stalled, looking at the otherworldly mob of purple-haired, platform-shoed kids dancing, “I'm thirsty, Greg. I . . . I need to find a bathroom.”

“But look at that cute guy over there,” he pleaded, gesturing to a shirtless, black-haired boy wearing a long rosary, “and
that
guy in the tie. I wanna go dance with them!”

“Then go dance!” I yelled over the pounding music.

“What?” Greg asked, pulling me closer as a sour-faced girl with four lip rings gave me the once-over. “I can't hear you!”

“GO DANCE!” I screamed.

“Nerd,” Greg murmured. He released me and was sucked into the crowd like a minnow absorbed by a great, pulsing, neon jellyfish. I wandered around the edge of the thrashing crowd, past a cheap plywood “bar,” where a guy with chunky glasses was pouring Coke and Sprite into plastic cups for a buck. At the back of the club I walked down a long, black lighted hallway. Outside was a patio where thirty teenagers hung out, smoking.

“Bitch! I'm talkin' to you, Mary!”

Out of the darkness stepped the girl from the line. She marched toward me like an angry drum major, trails of black silk flowing behind her. She looked like one of those Halloween ghost decorations you make by throwing a handkerchief over a tennis ball hung from the ceiling. She stopped a foot from my face and pointed at the unlit cigarette between her lips.

“Rock me, Amadeus.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Pleeeease.” She slowly dragged out the word like I had a learning disability. “Liiiight. Myyyy. Cigareeeette. Pleeeease.”

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, digging through the pockets of my pants and sweater as she tapped her metallic heel on the ground.

“Holy moley, Mary. How many pockets you got? Are you a boy or a pack mule?”

As I lifted the lighter to her cigarette, it slipped from my hand and fell onto the concrete. I bent over to get it in perfect time with her, bashing the top of my head on hers on the way down.

“Goddamn, bitch! Are you even licensed to operate a human body?”

“Oh. I'm sorry. I . . .”

“Just let me do the heavy lifting.”

Slowly, she bent over to pick up the lighter, keeping her eyes on me the whole time while guarding the top of her head with her hand. She sparked the lighter and held it out for me to see before bringing it to the tip of her cigarette. In slow motion she slipped the lighter back into my pocket. It was like watching a magician walk through the beginning of a “now you see it, now you don't” trick. I knew she was mocking me, but I couldn't help but chuckle.

“Glad I could provide
someone
a laugh tonight.” She exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke into my face. “My friend Ray-Ray was supposed to meet me here because he's into some seventeen-year-old piece of ass who can't get into the Bonham 'cause it's eighteen and over!”

“I've never been to the Bonham.”

“Of course you haven't, Mozart,” she replied, tugging my ponytail. “What old are you? Ten?”

“I'm actually sixteen, okay?” I blurted, defensively. “And my name is David.”

“Well well, little miss. There's no need to get sassy.”

“Sorry. It's just that my friend kind of left me alone and . . . I've never been here.”

“It's okay, girl. Looks like we've both been abandoned. My name's Sylvia, by the way,” she said, taking a long drag off her cigarette. “Hey! Wanna get high?”

“High?” I asked.

“Smoke out? Take a toke? Hit the reefer? Dance with Mary Jane? Insert euphemism at will. I'm supposed to save some for Ray-Ray. But he ain't here. So let's smoke up!”

I wanted to tell her I'd never smoked weed before, but she already thought I was ten years old. So I played along. “Okay, let's do it.”

“It takes two to tango,” she said, staring at me blankly. “You got a pipe or something?”

“Um, no. I . . .”

Sylvia walked to a picnic table where a guy in a kilt was slumped on a bench over a pool of vomit. She slipped a can of Coke from the unconscious boy's hand before yelling into his sleeping face, “Lay off the bagpipe, bitch!” She poured what was left in the can onto the ground and winked at me, saying, “Watch and learn, bitch. Watch and learn.”

Sylvia morphed into a flight attendant miming safety procedures, slowly turning the can on its side and denting the top to create a sort of concave bowl. She removed her crucifix earring and poked holes in the can at the center of the dent, the lowest part. Then she sprinkled weed from a Ziploc bag over the pinholes. She sucked on the popped top as she lit the mound of marijuana, making it crackle and glow in the dark.

“Here, girl,” she wheezed, exhaling a pungent cloud in my face. “Hit it.”

I placed my lips against the hole and took in a long drag. I tried to hold it in, the way I'd seen it done in movies, but I immediately felt an unbearable tickling in my throat. I clutched my chest and hacked a loud cough, a siren call for the stoners on the patio. An ebony-haired girl wearing a long black slip shuffled toward us with pleading eyes.

“Look, Morticia Addams, Mama ain't got no more smoky-smoke!” hissed Sylvia. As she dragged me back inside, I began to feel a strange warmth in my neck and head. Moving through
the hallway, I felt woozy and bloblike, like my whole body was a large cotton ball gently rolling down the hall. The eyes of the kids around me glowed a greenish-purple from the black lights hanging overhead. Their teeth looked dead and gray, like little radioactive pebbles glued into their mouths. The bits of dandruff on their black shoulders shone like stars.