Bad Kid (16 page)

The first odd thing I noticed was the crackling sound the pipe made as I lit it, like someone ate a bunch of Pop Rocks and opened their mouth to my ear. Then my head felt like it was in a microwave, severed on a dish while slowly spinning in waves of radiation.

I collapsed under the table onto all fours as my throat closed. My eyes watered as I tried harder to move air past the prickly blowfish that was expanding in my neck. The lights in my head were starting to go out. I reached up from under the table as tears streaked down my face.

“Sylvia . . . Help.”

She looked at me with blank, tired, pink-hued eyes, eyes that said, “I'm sorry. Have we met?” Slowly, a smile spread across her face as one of her eyes went a little googly, like the wandering, displaced eyeball of a broken doll. She let out a slow wheeze of a laugh, like air escaping from a slit tire.

“Bitch, you just smoked CRACK!”

The room erupted in laughter around me. As quickly as I'd thought I was going to black out, I felt an urgent rush of electricity course through me. My entire nervous system was on fire and my eyes felt like they were being pulled open by tiny, invisible wires. In the midst of the laughter, I slowly raised my head up. Beneath the table across from me were Leona's legs. As my vision cleared and my brain began to process at lightning speed, I found myself looking up Leona's dirty acid-washed denim skirt.
There they were: her withered, pendulous penis and testicles bouncing in time with her deep, cacophonous laughter.

The door across the room opened and Greg entered with the older guy in the red shirt. As he tucked in his tank-top, Greg scanned the scene before him.

“What happened?”

I was pretty sure at that moment that Greg had enjoyed a better night at the party than I had.

Between Greg's skin tips and Sylvia's eyebrow tweezing, I had a lot of look going on. Here I am posing with Greg, whose insane shoulder pads made him look like a power lesbian from the cast of
L.A. Law
. I wish Greg would've confronted me about my paisley button-down over the turtleneck t-shirt, but my pout almost makes up for it.

Almost.

H
oney, we're getting married! Mike is going to be your stepfather!”

Mike smiled at me across the restaurant table with tears in his eyes, presumably a symptom of that day's high pollen count.

“David, I want you to know that I love your mother very much. I think I can make you both very happy. I promise.” Mike's desperate insistence made me feel like I was buying a car. My mom shifted uncomfortably and shot him a look as he continued. “I just want you to know that Seguin is a great little town.”

And then I got it. The desperation, the sales pitch, my mother's forced grin as she twisted her dinner napkin into a little paper rope.

“We're moving to Seguin?” I asked.

“Honey, listen to your mother,” she begged. “Mike has a great job and a house in Seguin. His kids are near their grandparents and they're really settled there.”

“Well, I'm really settled
here
!” I snapped.

“David, we won't be moving until your school break! That's something, right?” My mother reached out and took my hand. “It's going to be great, and— What's that?”

“What's what?”

“This thing on your arm here,” she said, touching my happy-face scar.

“It's nothing!” I said, pulling my arm away. “I'm happy for you both. I just . . .” My mother stared at me hopefully, like she was waiting for my blessing. “Of course I'm happy,” I lied. “I'm sure Seguin will be great!”

“I am
not
moving to Seguin,” I declared, banging my fist on the steering wheel as Sylvia handed a joint to Greg in the backseat.

“Don't let them tell you what to do!” wheezed Greg.

“Emancipation, bitch!” screamed Sylvia. “Be your own man, girl!”

The three of us were driving half an hour outside of San Antonio to a town called New Braunfels, inexplicably pronounced “New Braun
s
fel” by those who lived there.

“Why do those hicks relocate their
S
's?” asked Sylvia, her glazed eyes half-closed.

“You're the one who wanted to come out here,” sighed Greg, perturbed that we were headed to the country instead of sneaking into the Bonham Exchange.

“Come on, bitches,” Sylvia moaned, teasing her freshly-dyed blood-red hair in the visor mirror. “Once you see fine-ass Tommy
you'll understand. He's got a Mohawk and did time for graffiti,” she squealed dreamily.

I'd agreed to go as long as she paid for the gas and cigarettes. But halfway there, with an empty tank and no smokes, Sylvia realized something.

“Oh, sorry, Minerva. I forgot my wallet at home.”

“You'd forget your pussy at home if it wasn't attached to your crotch,” Greg said, starting his and Sylvia's weekly cussing match.

“Look, Gregorian Chant, do you really want to start with me?”

“You forget your wallet a lot for someone who doesn't seem
that
stupid.”

“Whatever, cunt. Love your hair. Hope it wins.”

“Okay, Sylvia. At least my hair is tinted less than thirty colors.”

“Bitch, what you got ain't a tint. What you got is a frost!”

“Ah!” Greg's nostrils flared in offense. Sylvia had crossed a line. It was time to intervene.

“Guys, just stop fighting, okay? I've got enough for gas and smokes, all right?”

“David! Don't be a pushover,” Greg said, punching my shoulder from the backseat.

“Thanks, Crabb,” said Sylvia, snuggling her painted face against my arm. “Don't be mad, Miss Thing.”

A few minutes later I reached into the Walgreens drugstore bag in my lap and removed a small white plastic Vicks inhaler. With scissors from her purse, Sylvia cut through the rough, tubelike casing and removed the fibrous, cylindrical, menthol-soaked core, which looked like a cigarette filter with the paper stripped off. She cut it into three pieces and handed one to each of us.

“So what did Joey tell us to do with these?”

“I think he said you just wash it down with a drink,” she calmly answered.

I stared at her blankly.

“What?” she asked. “He said it's like cheap ecstasy. You just take it like a pill. It's called . . .” She looked down at the package in her hand. “Vicking?”

“Uh, that doesn't seem right, Sylvia.”

“Oh my God, David. Are you afraid to fucking eat a Vicks inhaler?” dared Greg, thus beginning his and Sylvia's weekly “make-fun-of-David” session, their version of make-up sex.

“Davey is afraid of getting too fucked up,” scolded Sylvia, twisting her fists in front of her eyes like a baby.

“Ha-ha. You are such a bitch, Sylvia,” said Greg.

“My name is David and I—” Sylvia jumped, as if surprised by something. “Oh, that's just my own shadow!”

Greg kicked the back of my seat in hysterics. “Girl, you are throwing some shade!”

“Come on, Mary! Take the goddamn thing.”

“Seriously, David.”

“Just swallow it, Stick-in-the-mud.”

“Come on, dude.”

“Do it, Minerva!”

Their imploring became too intense.

“SHUT UP!” I interrupted, popping the fuzzy little cylinder into my mouth and swallowing.

“Ha-ha! You're fucking insane,” cackled Greg, throwing his Vicks chunk at Sylvia and falling over in the backseat. “You actually ate it!”

Sylvia threw her Vicks out the window and squealed with
laughter. “You are crazy, Crabb!” she cackled, trying to catch her breath. “I can't . . . believe . . . you ate it . . .”

As my stomach emitted an ominous growl, I braced myself for what was coming.

A few minutes later we pulled up to a shabby mobile home with several smaller trailers attached to its sides and roof, like a white-trash M. C. Escher painting. After I applied some powder, fixed my ponytail, and straightened my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt, we headed to the front door. I could hear thrashing music inside as we walked onto the porch, which was littered with cigarette butts, beer bottles, and a waterlogged recliner. In the dimly lit living room were about thirty people, although the bed in the center made me think it might not be the living room after all. Some skinny, hairless boys looked at me from a dark corner as I neared the wood-paneled kitchen bar. Glass broke behind me after an enormous guy in a puffy jacket threw a beer bottle against the wall. As two boys in tank tops started to punch each other, I realized that these people, although freaks, were not my kind of freaks.

These freaks were skinheads.

Sylvia and Greg were nowhere to be seen. I could feel the piercing stares of every bald, steel-toed, suspender-wearing dude in the room. I was suddenly the correct answer in a very dangerous game of “one of these things is not like the other.” I felt like a Vegas showgirl in full regalia stranded deep inside Rikers Island. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I rushed back onto the porch. By the blue light of a crackling bug zapper I tried to de-fag myself as quickly as possible, shaking my hair out from its ponytail and rubbing makeup off my face. I unrolled my jeans to cover my Doc Marten boots while scanning the cigarette embers
glowing in the backyard, hoping to see Greg or Sylvia attached to one of them. My hands trembled as I tried to light my Benson & Hedges Ultra Light 120, thinking, “Dammit! Why don't I smoke butch-er cigarettes?”

From the darkness came a spark and flicker. A flaming Zippo gracefully rose to my cigarette. I felt like Marlene Dietrich in a noir film.

“I gotcha,” said the hulking Cro-Magnon with cropped brown hair towering over me. “I'm Max.” He popped the Zippo closed in a single swift motion. Max wore a white T-shirt with an Irish slogan on it. Tiny suspenders dangled from his pants, which were rolled up high around sixteen-hole Docs.

“Uh, hi. I'm David,” I stuttered.

“I've never seen you around here. Where do you live?”

“Uh, San Antonio. I'm from there. You know, I was born there,” I continued, unable to stop speaking due to my nerves. “But we're supposedly moving to Seguin.”

“Oh yeah. That's the town with the big nut.”

“Yup. It's the biggest pecan or some stupid shit like that,” I croaked, trying to sound ultrastraight while avoiding too much direct eye contact.

“Your hair reminds me of someone,” Max said, squeezing the cigarette between his lips with his thumb and index finger.

“Mine?” I raised my hands to my head, realizing that my scalp felt unusually sensitive. “Probably Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode. I get that a lot.”

“Hmmm. I was thinking it looked more like that chick from Deee-Lite.”

I paused, wondering if I should feel threatened. But as my skin began to tingle, I wasn't offended at all. Perhaps it was the
Vicks inhaler I'd eaten, but I found Max's comparison hilarious. Once I began laughing, I couldn't stop. And as Max laughed with me, he seemed transformed. He might have been laughing
at
me, but it didn't matter, because suddenly he had dimples and chubby cheeks like a giant, overgrown baby.

“You're funny,” Max guffawed, handing me a warm beer.

Over the next hour everyone came outside to say hi to him. Each partygoer gave me the once-over and looked to Max, who gave a straight-faced nod, as if to say, “This guy's okay.” One by one, each skinheaded boy and Mohawked girl shook my trembling, clammy hand. I felt like I was holding court with Max, who was apparently the mayor of freaks in New Braunfels.

As I started to Vick harder, I could feel my hair growing, and the wind on my neck. I couldn't stop stretching.

“Dude. Are you a yogi or something?” grinned Max as I reached down to touch my feet. “Who are you here with?”

“Oh, they ditched me,” I said, sliding into downward-facing dog on some skinhead's patio.

“Fuck 'em, dude,” proclaimed Max, clinking his beer bottle against mine.

“So, Max. You seem cool,” I said, raising my leg onto the deck railing like an extra from
Fame
. “But how can you be a skinhead?” The rush of Vicks in my bloodstream was making me a little cocky. “Aren't they all fascists and racists?”

“Dude. Hold up,” barked Max, slamming down his beer. “I'm not a bigot. I'm a SHARP.”

I froze midstretch, confused by the term. “Huh?”

“A SHARP: a skinhead against racial prejudice. We take the aesthetic of the enemy and subvert it,” he explained. “See, skins wear white laces for white power, but we wear multicolored laces
for unity. Skins are straightedge, but we'll smoke pot, drink beer, huff shit, whatever. Plus, skinheads are always looking for a fight. SHARPs only fight if provoked.”

“So you're like the hippies of punks or something?”

“Ha-ha! Oh fuck, that's funny. Sean!” he yelled over my shoulder. “My friend Dave just said SHARPs are like ‘the hippies of punks'!”

Max popped open another beer and told me about the little town that might be my future home. “You know their football team is called the Seguin Matadors, right?”

“Like a bullfighter?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he chuckled, taking a long drag off his cigarette. “But at away games, no one knows the little shithole. It gets mispronounced. So as they rush onto the field they get introduced like this.” Max made his wrists limp, and in a fey, high-pitched register, cheeped, “Welcome the Sequined Matadors!”

That night, the two of us joked and drank for hours, talking about good music and news propaganda and racial intolerance and our single moms. Hanging out with Max felt like reuniting with someone I'd always known, someone familiar. I had a genuine feeling that Max was going to be a good friend.

And then I had a different feeling: the kind you get when you've eaten a toxic chemical meant for topical use. The wind felt ice-cold. My muscles started convulsing. My scalp was covered in fire ants. I gripped my belly as the contents of my stomach came to a boil.

“Are you okay, dude?” Max asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but instead of words, a projectile spray of vomit erupted from between my lips. I puked repeatedly off the side of the porch, hoping between each bout
that it was almost over. Finally, as I wiped the last bit of vomit off my mouth, a glass of water appeared in front of me.

“You okay, friend?”

“Sorry,” I answered, totally ashamed. “I ate a Vicks inhaler on the way over.”

“You ate . . . What?” he asked before roaring with laughter.

Max laughed at me all the way to his house, where he lent me a clean, puke-less shirt with a leprechaun on it and allowed me to crash on his bedroom floor. I woke up the next morning around seven, still unsure what had happened to Greg and Sylvia. I dressed quietly and looked around at Max's room, barely lit in the rising sun. The floor was littered with dirty clothes and a dozen pairs of boots. The walls were covered in posters for the Misfits, Bob Marley, and Operation Ivy. On a dresser by the door was a collection of framed photos: Max and his mom, Max with two girls, Max in a huddle of boys with cropped hair.

I grabbed my keys and prepared to walk back to my car in Max's oversize leprechaun shirt. As I crept into the hallway, a shaft of light filled the bedroom. Max was still asleep on his bed, curled up into a tiny ball. It seemed impossible that anyone as large as he'd seemed the night before could suddenly look so small.

I left a note on his door before I left. “Thanks for everything. PS—If anyone ever offers you a Vick's inhaler, DO NOT eat it.”