Bad Kid (19 page)

J
ust gimme your keys, crack whore!” yelled Sylvia.

“But why?” I slurred back, swaying with my big red Solo cup of rum in some stranger's living room.

“Just give me your keys!” she screamed again.

“But I don't want to leave!” I yelled back, placing my drink on a shelf that wasn't there. As it smashed to the floor, Sylvia reached into my pocket and ran away with my car keys.

“Hey, Sylvia . . .” The next word came out in the form of vomit—all over the carpet, a chair back, and my shoes. A roll of paper towels hit me in the face.

“David, fucking pull it together!” Greg was standing with Jake in the kitchen. “Stop fucking drinking!”

“Fuck you,” I said, laughing to myself as I squatted down. I'm not sure if it was the weed, the rum, the bump, or the ephedrine pills I'd bought from the truck stop, but my equilibrium was shot, and I ended up sitting in a pile of my own puke. After
cleaning the floor and myself, I stumbled to the front yard, where Sylvia had popped the hood of my car.

“What are you doing, Sylvie?”

“I'm getting' high!” she yelled, leaning over the engine as Ray-Ray started the car. “Your AC isn't working 'cause you got a coolant leak!”

Sylvia leaned over into the engine and put her mouth on a small metal tube.

I stumbled forward, confused. “Wait. You're sucking on my car engine to get high?” Falling back onto the cement, Sylvia held her belly and rolled around, laughing in a deep, demonic voice.

“What's happening to her?” I asked Ray-Ray as he pulled back his golden locks and leaned beneath the hood.

“We're getting high off this Freon leak! It'll give you major wah-wahs, but be careful, 'cause that shit constricts your throat and can suffocate your ass.”

“That's crazy,” I said, leaning under the hood for a hit. Soon a small group of partygoers was lined up at my car. A dozen of us rolled around on the lawn, the satanic timbres of our laughter creating more laughter until we sounded like a pack of goats.

The next day I sat in second-period algebra focusing on one thing: not vomiting. Watching Ms. Kelsey's arm fat flap around like a rooster's neck as she wrote on the board was making me ill. I was just about to ask to go to the bathroom when the PA system came to life.

“David Crabb, please report to your guidance counselor's office.” I sat still for a moment, doubting what I'd heard, until it repeated: “David Crabb. To the guidance counselor's office.”

I walked down the linoleum-tiled hallway, stoned out of my mind. Greg and I had gotten super-baked two hours earlier to fend off our hangovers. At the front office, a secretary gestured to the door of my guidance counselor, Brownie Richardson.

Brownie was a man. Yes. A full-grown, fifty-year-old man with thick spectacles and a salt-and-pepper bowl cut had chosen to work in academia with the name “Brownie.” He stood up from his desk and straightened his baggy suit.

“Well, hello, David,” he said cheerfully in a froglike baritone.

“Hi, Mr. . . .” I paused, realizing that every note I'd ever forged to skip school was laid out on the desk before me—more than a dozen letters with my dad's faked signature.

“I think it's time we had a talk, David. Don't you?”

I was about to answer when I sensed movement in the corner of the room. I turned around to see my father. His beet-red face made his bald head look like a tiny, scarlet stress ball. He gripped the arms of his chair, his jaw tightly clenched, staring down at the floor like he was trying to burn a hole through it.

“Have a seat next to your father,” Brownie said with a broad smile.

I sat cautiously in the vinyl chair a mere foot from my dad. I was trying so hard to act sober that I felt like the attempt was actually counteracting my goal. Every move I made or thing I said seemed strained or over-pronounced.

“How are YOU do-ING,
Mr
. RichardSON?” I asked, emphasizing all the wrong syllables. My elbow was having a hard time securing itself against the armrest, slipping back and forth against either side.

“Well, David. As you can see, we seem to be having a problem with honesty, which is disappointing,” said Brownie, patting the notes on his desk. “I can tell from looking at you that you're a nice guy. You never fight or wind up in detention. But you apparently never wind up in class, either.” Brownie chuckled lightheartedly at his little joke and looked at my father, who continued to glare hatefully at the carpet. “I'm going to ask you a few questions now, David.”

“Sure. Okay.” My voice broke a little in response to the silent waves of fury radiating from my father.

“So, David. Would your father understand if you told him you were on drugs?”

“What?” I replied with immediate incredulity. “How could you think that? How could you accuse me of such a thing?” Meryl Streep would've eaten her heart out as I pounded on the desk, demanding, “Give me a cup. I'll pee in it right now and you'll know the truth!” Ironically, being stoned out of my mind was really helping my performance. Before I knew it, I was standing over Brownie's desk, dramatically pointing to the door, as if someone with a portable urine-testing lab waited on the other side. “Give me a cup and I'll PEE IN IT!” I yelled.

“Calm down. No one's on trial,” Brownie said, even though someone was. “Would your father understand if you'd gotten a girl pregnant?” he asked, reverting to what I could only imagine was one of his stock “troubled youth” questions.

“Yeah. He'd understand,” I answered, my lower lip beginning to tremble. I glanced beside me for a response, but my dad still wouldn't look at me. Brownie cleared his throat and in a
low, hushed tone asked, “David. Would your father understand if you told him you were gay?”

As the ground slipped away beneath me, I felt like Wile E. Coyote. Like I'd jumped off the edge of a cliff and was hovering over a pit of rocks, my little cartoon legs spinning.

It's not supposed to happen like this
, I thought.
It should get to be my choice
.

“No. He wouldn't understand,” I said.

Why did I just say that? Shut up, David. Shut up
.

Brownie squinted, like my answer had confused him. “He . . . wouldn't?”

This second question was a golden opportunity to explain that I'd just misheard him. I could say I was simply too high on LSD and Freon to have accurately represented how very heterosexual I was. I could fix it. But again I said, “No. He wouldn't understand.”

I couldn't tell if I was really high or suddenly stone-cold sober, but there were tears in my eyes. As much as I'd felt accepted during the last year, this admission to my father made what I'd thought I'd come to terms with real. Everything was about to change. I started wishing myself out of the room, wishing myself somewhere else—not with Greg or Sylvia or Raven but somewhere alone, hermetically sealed in a vacuum, untouchable. My father looked into my eyes, not with anger or sadness but blankly, like he'd just been punched in the solar plexus and was stuck in that moment right
before
the pain hits.

In the car on the way home, a new mantra kept repeating in a horrible loop.

My dad knows I'm gay. My dad knows I'm gay. My dad knows I'm gay
.

It's humiliating enough being outed to your father by your guidance counselor. But it's especially emasculating when his name is Brownie. I'd hardly noticed him at school before, but now he found me in the halls two or three times a day to pat me on the back and ask me how my father and I were doing. He was trying to be kind. But all I saw was the man who'd ruined my father's happiness forever.

My dad took time off work so that we were together every morning and night. I'd even heard him creep into my room at 3 a.m., presumably to make sure I hadn't shimmied out the window of our third-floor apartment. I was gay. I wasn't Spider-Man.

After a week of awkward, nerve-racking meals together, I hoped things were improving with my dad. I'd been attending all my classes and had hardly seen my friends. One night, we sat over our plates eating steaks and watching
Wheel of Fortune
. My mouth full of squash, I said, “Do you think Vanna White ever has alphabet nightmares? Like being devoured by vowels and stuff like that?”

My dad laughed hard for a few seconds, looking at me with an expression I'd missed. But all at once, the warmth vanished, as if he'd realized that laughter was something he couldn't offer me anymore. His warm chuckling was suddenly replaced by an intensified scraping of fork against knife. He stared at me with the saddest eyes and asked, “You know what they do, right?”

“What?” I had an idea what he meant, but I was hoping I was wrong.

“Homosexuals. You
know
what they do, don't you?” he asked again before returning to eating his steak.

After dinner I locked myself in my room, attempting to call
my lost and missing friends. Outside, I could hear cabinets slamming and angrily washed glasses ringing against one another. I tore open
Behaviour
, the new Pet Shop Boys CD that Hector had given me, and popped it into the stereo. The first song “Being Boring” began quietly with the sound of a digital flute and gentle wah-wah guitar licks. I turned the track up louder, hoping to tune out my father and transport myself anywhere but that tiny, lonely bedroom. The lyrics tell the story of a man's life from boyhood to middle age, the first few verses detailing “invitations to teenage parties” and the tentative thrill of leaving home. The first half of the song mirrored exactly how I felt in that moment; ecstatically impatient for the future, but frightened about the loss my freedom might bring about. I played the song again and again, each spin holding me like an invisible blanket in my bed.

Half an hour later, there was a knock on my door. My dad walked in carefully, the way you would around an untamed animal. He pulled up a chair across from me and sat down, pulling something from his back pocket. “I want to show you something,” he said, revealing the August 1987 issue of
Penthouse
magazine. For a moment I was happy.
Rolando!
I thought, happy to see my long-lost G-stringed Latin or Italian or Greek lover.

“David. I want to ask you, and there's no wrong answer here. Well, there is a wrong . . . Um . . .” My father hesitated, searching for the right words. “Anyway . . . I want to ask you . . . Who are you more attracted to? Her . . .” he said, pointing with a grin to Candy and her satellite-dish areolas, “ . . . or
him
?”

This was different. Answering this question wasn't like committing to a simple label. This was saying to my father that I wanted to do what “they do” with “that guy”—the ripped, tan one with the broad shoulders and the sweaty bulge in his thong.

I took my time answering the question, hemming and hawing in hopes that a ringing phone or knock at the door would keep me from having to tell my father the truth. But eventually, the silence became more unnerving than the possibility of admitting the truth.

“Him,” I said quickly, like I was ripping off a Band-Aid.

In the stillness that followed, I thought that this was about to be the moment my dad stopped loving me or called me a name he wouldn't be able to take back. I braced myself, afraid that this would be the instant I stopped having a father. Leonard stood up slowly from the chair and rolled up his magazine. I waited for his response, knowing that his sprinkler system of rage was about to be firmly aimed at me and no one else.

“Well, son,” he blurted with forced excitement, “tomorrow we're having fajitas for dinner!” Then, before I had time to reply or process his response, he spun on his heels and left.

I spent the next several weeks coming out to my father over and over again. It was like a gay
Groundhog Day
. He'd point out a pretty woman at the mall. I'd agree, and then he'd ask me how I could know if I was
really
gay.

“Dad! I'm gay, not dead!”

I would mention that I found Freddie Mercury weird-looking and my dad would smile, as if finding a gay person unattractive somehow made me straight. Regardless of how many times I said it, it always seemed like the first to my dad, who would look at me with sad, confused eyes and then go silent.

After a few weeks, my dad decided to go back on the road full-time. I'd be moving in with my mom and Mike in Seguin. I didn't put up a fight. How could I? He'd rearranged
his life and spent thousands of dollars to support his secretly gay, school-skipping, drug-addled son. A part of me was almost relieved to get away from the tension, even if it
was
to Seguin.

On our last night in the apartment I was packing up a box of journals and sketchpads when I found an old greeting card. My father had sent it to me when I was little and away at summer camp. On the front was a drawing of a big, orange lion with a little, smiling cub at his side. Inside, my father had asked how my summer was going and if I was making new friends. At the end, he wrote something that he said to me a lot when I was little: that the reason he loved me wasn't just that he was my father. He loved me because I was a “neat person,” and he thought that even if he wasn't my father, I was someone he would want to know.

I took the card across the hall, where my father was packing up his things. I crept into his room carefully, the way he'd crept into mine three weeks earlier. He wasn't so much an untamed animal as a zombie, shuffling from closet to dresser to bed, unaware of his conniving son's presence in the room.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, DJ?”

“I'm sorry. I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said into his suitcase.

“Why do you love me, though?”

He paused, wearily looking up from a pile of two suitcases' worth of clothing he was trying to cram into one. “What do you mean?”