Bad Kid (18 page)

“But girls, it's almost midnight and I'm all dressed up!”

“Shhhh!” demanded Sterling. “We're too fucked up to drive and we
have
to finish this show!”

The two of them devoured more cookies as Sylvia stomped to the kitchen and poured herself a cocktail. Eventually, she sat
with us and surrendered to the fact that this would not be a big night out. At 2 a.m. we were transfixed by our fourth straight episode of
True Life
, glued to Serena Altschul's chilling, in-depth exposé on a tiny Texas town torn apart by a string of cult-related animal sacrifices. Even I'd fallen victim, so stoned after my sixth cookie that I'd totally forgotten about the smooth, tan boy with crystal-blue eyes lying in my bed.

Around three in the morning I woke up alone on the couch.

“Hello?” I called as someone in the apartment giggled. There was an odd taste in my mouth and something sandy and brittle in my teeth. I walked into my dad's bedroom, looking for Sylvia. In the bathroom mirror I looked at my brown tongue and noticed something on my lip. I removed a small piece of newspaper from my mouth and caught a whiff of my own rank breath. Looking into my dad's bathtub, it hit me.

“Ha-ha, bitch!” howled Sylvia in the mirror over my shoulder. “You ate cat shit!”

I bent over the toilet and retched, slamming the door in Sylvia's face with my foot. After five minutes of vomiting I stormed into the living room, where she was shutting the front door behind Sterling and Ray-Ray.

“Now, David. Before you get too mad—”

“You fucking bitch!” I screamed, pushing her against the wall. “Get out!”

“I'm sorry, Crab-Cakes. I just got too fucked up. I was a little mad,” she pleaded, her bloodshot eyes filled with tears. “I don't mean to hurt people,” she sobbed. “I just lose control sometimes. I love you. Please, I don't have anywhere to go.” Barefoot with crooked lipstick, she became the victim again, a transformation
she excelled at, partly through manipulation and partly in truth. “Please, Minerva. Just let me stay here tonight.”

As I looked into her sad, bloodshot eyes, I saw a girl who, for all her faults, had become the closest thing I'd ever had to a sister. But I couldn't bear to give her permission. Instead I walked away, leaving her to cry alone. In my room, Jake was passed out, curled up into a cocoon under my bedspread. I lay down next to him, feeling a total lack of horniness, the taste of cat shit still ripe in my mouth. After an hour I was still too enraged to sleep. And I knew what I had to do.

Next door in my father's room, Sylvia was passed out on her side, still fully dressed. I snuck past her and into the bathroom, where I leaned over Voltaire's makeshift litter box and retrieved a small turd with toilet-papered fingers. Quietly, I crept toward the bed, the rising sun just beginning to peek through the blinds. At the edge of the bed I stopped, seeing Sylvia's journal open on the floor. I leaned over it and noticed my name. It was a letter to me.

In the letter, Sylvia apologized profusely for what she'd done, writing that she'd never meant to hurt me and regretted how she'd behaved. She ended the note by reminding me that I was her best friend and hoped that I could trust her again one day.

In the mirror over my dad's dresser I caught my own reflection: standing there with a piece of cat shit in my hand, prepared to feed it to one of my best friends. Not only was it a cruel prank, it wasn't even clever, doing the exact same thing to Sylvia that she had done to me. It was pathetic. She hadn't even locked the bedroom door. She could've. But she trusted me. Just as I thought this, Sylvia rolled over to face me in her sleep, revealing a star-shaped
tapestry of a dozen Band-Aids covering her mouth. Still holding the wad of Voltaire's poop at my side, I looked down at her messy face. Sylvia: my loving,
trusting
friend.

I woke up around 1 p.m. the next day with Jake beside me. In the night, he'd kicked off all the sheets and removed his underwear. I was curled up against his side fully clothed, my face resting against his chest. He smelled musky and the skin on his belly was soft as I rubbed my hand across it. I looked up to see him staring at me with those pale-blue eyes, close enough that I could see every beautiful line and detail in his plump pink lips, which I'd never wanted to kiss so badly.

“Hey David.”

“Yeah,” I replied, pulling him close to me as my erection grew against his hip.

“You wanna suck it?”

“What?” I asked, thinking I'd misinterpreted the layered nuance of his romantic gesture.

“My dick,” he clarified. “Wanna suck it?”

I looked down at his penis, which was brightly lit by a shaft of midday sun creeping under the blinds. It was flaccid and wrinkled. I'd never seen a penis so brightly lit before. The head was more purple than I'd expected. The balls looked far too hairy to belong to Jake. The urethra seemed way too big, like the mouth of a dehydrated sandworm from
Dune
. Jake cleared his throat and hocked a loogie into a glass on my bedside table. The musky odor of his body was suddenly pungent and overpowering, like a bunch of old onions.

“Well?” he said, gesturing to his penis like I was a child who hadn't finished his dinner. I looked at it again, a little bit repulsed.

“Um,” I stuttered, unable to answer him.

“Oh. Uh, okay,” he said, sitting up stiffly in the bed. “Well, I gotta go, dude.”

Jake jumped up and dressed quickly, either too mad or too embarrassed to take his time. After he left I felt ashamed that I couldn't perform, without being entirely sure that any part of me had actually wanted to. I'd had him in the palm of my hand, but I let him get away. What was my deal with sex? Why was I so afraid of intimacy that I couldn't even do it with a pickle?

Sylvia stumbled out of her room around 2 p.m., lit a cigarette, and curled up with me on the couch. She was rude, foulmouthed, and untrustworthy. But she was the devil I knew. I spent the day with her watching TV and drinking screwdrivers while Voltaire ate leftover pizza on the dining-room table. Cigarette butts were everywhere and a potted plant in the corner had fallen onto my dad's turntable, but I couldn't be bothered to clean any of it up. This was my castle. And I was its prince.

T
he ceiling was made of pudding. Wave after wave of thick tapioca hovered above me. Or was I hovering above it, suspended over an endless ocean of heavy cream? Somewhere, a chain saw revved as a woman screamed. The ceiling shifted to my left as the carpeted floor slid out from under my face to meet the soles of my feet.

Oh, wait. I'm standing up now
.

The room was dim. A foot with black-painted toenails stuck out from a down comforter on the floor. A digital clock read 7:05. It meant nothing to me.
Am I early for school or late for dinner? What day is it? What town am I in?

Sitting on the edge of someone's bed, I noticed a raccoon watching me from a window. And then something fell into place.
Suddenly the pudding ocean was just the ceiling. The chain saw was just a stereo. The screaming was a girl laughing outside. The feet belonged to Greg. And the raccoon was my own face in a mirror, reflected back at me. My eyeliner had been perfect last night, but now it had gathered in two smeared pools beneath each eye. I looked like one of those Mexican skeleton dolls.

I stood up as a Mohawked girl in panties ran past the doorway. A moment later, a boy in a red elephant-trunk thong ran after her, a houseplant cascading out of his backpack.

The stereo was too loud.

I am the son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
.

I crept onto the floor and underneath the huge comforter, whispering, “Wake up, Greg.”

“David, where are we?”

“I don't know.”

Suddenly Greg and I were both very awake, which always happened quickly the morning after we dropped two hits of acid.

“Greg! My mom!” I yelped, remembering that I was supposed to have spent the night with her in Seguin. “She must be so pissed!”

“No, David. It's fine. You had me impersonate my mom and call her. Remember?”

“I had you call my mom while we were tripping and fake your mom's voice?”

“Yeah. It worked fine. I told her you were staying over because we got food poisoning. We talked about the Botanical Garden for, like, a hundred years.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Then we talked about how great our sons are and how, of all the Designing Women, she feels most like the Annie Potts character. Your mom is so vulnerable. I love Libras. They're so—”

“Wait. You talked about
Designing Women
with my mom on acid?”

“Yeah. She's a firecracker! Woman-to-woman, I can really sense that kind of manic Annie Potts energy about her,” said Greg, slipping into his fake mom voice. “See? I'm good, right?”

Just then, a shaft of light crossed the floor. We looked toward the bedroom door, where a girl with bright-red lips stood in a sequined yellow jacket and golden top hat. She held a Mountain Dew and started to slow-motion tap dance like she was trudging through imaginary maple syrup.

Greg rolled over and looked at me excitedly. “David! I remember! We went dancing with Carla and then dropped acid at
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.”

And then the rest of it fell into place: sneaking Carla out her bedroom window, meeting Greg at the Dumpster behind the Bill Miller Bar-B-Que, huffing whippits by the mailboxes at Sylvia's apartment, snorting ephedrine in a bathroom with a stranger, getting into a fight with Jake about Depeche Mode's pre-
Violator
work, gorging ourselves on Taco Cabana guacamole and queso, driving to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at the Northwest 14 Theatre, holding Sylvia's hair out of her face as she puked up Taco Cabana guacamole and queso in the movie theater parking lot, and finally ending up at George's apartment for rum and Diet Cokes.

“But we're not at George's,” Greg said, scratching his head and looking around. He blurted to our visitor, “Hi, Columbia!”

She stopped moving, like a deer caught in headlights.

“Don't startle her. She's fucked up,” I whispered.

“David, are we still tripping?” Greg whispered back. “I mean . . . my favorite character from
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
has just come to life right in front of me!”

Her body hung limply like a broken-down robot, her arm barely swinging from the flimsy joint of her elbow.

Greg screamed, “Hello!”

With a jolt, she suddenly came to life, put her hand on her hip, bent slightly to her left, and with cold, black eyes stated matter-of-factly, “I am a teapot.”

Greg and I laughed nervously as she swayed. I could feel my guts aching from the acid we'd taken. Every burst of laughter cramped me to the core. We retreated beneath the comforter and curled in toward each other until our knees were touching.

“Whose car did we drive here? Yours or mine?” Greg asked.

“I don't know. I guess we should get out of here and figure it out.”

Ten minutes later we tiptoed through a minefield of sleeping freaks on the living-room floor. Holding hands to balance each other, we navigated our way through a forest of fishnet-wrapped limbs capped in Doc Marten boots. Black-painted fingernails peeked out like creeping moss around graffitied jackets and shrubs of teased purple hair.

Five feet from the door, I felt a hand grip my ankle. Instinctively I screamed, “I don't know anyone!” as if being a stranger here somehow protected me from this person.

A girl with fuchsia hair wearing a silver choker stared up at me with giant, dilated pupils. Wiping a long strand of spittle from the corner of her mouth, she began to weep.

“Where are Brian's keys?”

“Um . . . who's Brian?” I asked her.

Greg pulled me toward the door. “David! Don't engage her!”

“WHERE ARE BRIAN'S KEEEEYS?!?!?!”

As she wailed, the human floor shifted to life. Crushed velvet tree roots became snakes made of human arms and legs.

“Run!” Greg shrieked.

We flew out the door as the fuchsia-haired girl screamed, “KEEEEYYSSS!!!”

Around the side of the building, we found ourselves in the complex's parking lot. I tried to catch my breath and shielded my eyes from the scorching Texas sun.

“Greg, I need air-conditioning. Now.”

As we scanned the parking lot, I could feel the armpits of my shirt began to fill with perspiration. Greg drove a tiny car that was always a pain in the ass to find, especially in the sea of massive vehicles that filled most San Antonio parking lots. We stumbled from row to row of parked cars. Greg pointed his key-ring remote in different directions, hoping to hear a chirp from his little red Cabriolet, a strangely happy car considering that it was driven by a guy in a bat necklace. My mouth was bone-dry and beads of sweat collected on my forehead. I threw my head back in exhaustion, my mouth hanging open like a broken Pez dispenser.

“Where is your caaaaaaar?”

I was going to puke. Or maybe I needed to eat. In the distance I saw a fifteen-foot-wide sombrero hovering in the sky. It wasn't a hallucination. It was a Taco Cabana. And it was all I needed. I could almost taste their breakfast tacos. I imagined every combination possible: egg, bacon, cheese; carne asada; chicken fajita with guacamole; bean, cheese, potato . . .

“GREG! Where's the motherfucking car?!?!”

“Bitch! Stop screaming at me already! You already hooked up with the love of my life!” he yelled. “Can you at least not scream at me?”

He hadn't brought up that night at my house since his first day back at school a couple weeks earlier. I wanted to tell Greg that I'd failed miserably at hooking up with Jake. But soothing his feelings would mean embarrassing myself. It seemed better to let him think something had happened. So I mumbled, “Sorry,” and left it at that.

We strolled through the parking lot, getting looks from suits holding coffee thermoses on their way to work: Greg in his combat boots and dangling earrings, me with my dirty, shoulder-length hair and raccoon eyes, wearing a thousand rubber-band bracelets. Greg kept aiming his key-chain remote into the expanse of pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles surrounding us, like someone hopelessly trying to find water in the desert using a forked stick. Finally we heard it: the high-pitched, sissy chirp of Greg's car alarm beeping from his Lilliputian red convertible.

Once inside, we collapsed into the seats, as if we'd arrived home with no intention of actually driving anywhere. Greg lit a Marlboro Ultra-Light 100 and French inhaled a long strand of cigarette smoke. He studied himself in the mirror as if I wasn't there, admiring the perfection with which he passed the toxic smog from his lips to his nostrils.

“David, should we go to school today?”

I flipped the wall calendar in my head. “Is today a weekday?”

Greg noticed an Alamo Bank sign towering above us. “Well, it's 7:25 a.m. and ninety-one degrees, and today is May 29.”

We stared at each other, hoping to somehow transform that
information into a clue regarding whether it was a Tuesday or a Sunday.

“What do we do, Greg? Today is Wednesday . . . I think.”

“Well, we can't go to school like
this
.”

We pulled down our visor mirrors and inspected our bloodshot eyes, crusty hair, and cosmetic-blotched skin.

“David, I think we should rest today.”

“But we haven't gone in a few days. Because I remember Raven—”

“Hey,” Greg interrupted. “Sorry I yelled at you about Jake.”

“I'm the sorry one,” I apologized. “I should've stayed with you that night. I'm really sorry that—”

“Shut up!” Greg yelled, smacking my forehead. “Stop saying sorry all the time about everything, okay?”

“Oh, sorry,” I instinctively said again.

Greg glared at me, trying not to smile. “Look, nerd. Are we going to school or not?”

I shrugged and waited for Greg to make up my mind for me, the way he always did.

“Fuck it,” he said, lighting a roach from the ashtray.

A few minutes later as we pulled away from the Taco Cabana drive-through with our breakfasts, we pieced together the rest of the previous night: who kissed whom, who took what, who was hot, who seemed cooler than we'd thought, who'd been lame. Greg blasted the Cure's
Disintegration
from his car stereo and we drove past our school. Rolling by slowly, we watched our friends, enemies, and peers march through the huge brick arch leading to the courtyard. They looked so tired, their shoulders slouching as they shuffled to first period. Their backpacks looked so heavy, like they were
full of stones. It seemed too early in the morning for anyone, including us, to have obligations.

“Suckers,” Greg hissed. He pushed a button and the convertible top retracted over our heads, releasing the huge cloud of marijuana smoke we'd been hotboxing on our drive. In the rearview mirror we could see a clan of preps cough and gag on our mood-altering exhaust.

Greg convulsed in a maniacal fit of laughter, shredded lettuce and salsa spilling out the side of his mouth.

“Enjoy the contact high, bitches!”

I felt bad for all those kids: all the preps, jocks, kickers, Bowheads, punks, nerds, potheads, and goths stuck in that academic jail on such a beautiful day. But I felt guilty too, ashamed of all the lies I'd told and would continue to tell to remain the way I was that day: absolutely and perfectly free.

This is the kind of half-assed drag that lots of alt-youth boys attempted at least once at the hands of their Bowie-obsessed, Martin Gore–loving, New Wave girlfriends. Here, the girls turned Greg and me into their own living, breathing, life-size dolls. Although we had partial say in our “looks, ” I have to blame the girls for the final outfit choices. While Greg got to look like a saucy, shapely pole dancer, I was reimagined as a Puckish stewardess with kerchief and headband. We stayed inside sporting these looks, drinking Strawberry Hill, and listening to Yaz's “Upstairs at Eric's” the rest of the night. Later in the evening there was makeup application and some light hair-crimping. I can only thank God that those pictures haven't surfaced, as I looked like a candy-faced, ghoulish Raggedy Ann in all of them.