Bad Kid (21 page)

“Max, right?” I asked. “It's me. David.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What's wrong?” I asked, my open hand still unshaken.

“You didn't eat a Vicks inhaler on the way over, did you?”

“No. I promise.”

I
t's a love song when you really listen to it!” yelled Max.

“Huh?” I said, rolling down the window to let out a cloud of pot smoke.

“I said, IT'S A LOVE SONG!”

It was hard to hear him over the banging drums and sneering guitars erupting from his crappy car speakers. It sounded like noise to me, like most of the music Max played during our car trips. In two weeks of friendship, we'd established a ritual: I drove to New Braunfels around noon and met Max at his house. We spent the day together, until 6 p.m., when my newly watchful mother demanded I be home for dinner. Sometimes we spent the day visiting his friends. Other times we just drove around—through the golf course, to the abandoned train bridge, or in circles around the famous water park, Schlitterbahn.

During this time we engaged in a kind of musical show-and-tell. He played me the Misfits, Hüsker Dü, or Fugazi, and then I played him the Smiths, Soft Cell, or Peter Murphy. Slowly, we were compiling a playlist of songs we both learned to love. Between us in the car was a black vinyl case of “our cassettes”: a growing collection of mixtapes that included the Lemonheads, New Order, the Sundays, Black Flag, and, surprisingly, Erasure.

I loved watching Max rock back and forth in the passenger seat with bloodshot eyes, screaming along to his favorite Erasure song, “Yahoo!,” a jubilantly gay dance hymn about higher love. Watching his massive frame pound the dashboard to Andy Bell's sweet refrain, “find your way unto the Lord,” made me laugh every time—not because I was mocking Max but because his joyous abandon was that infectious. Maybe it was weird for him too, watching me with painted nails and a turquoise nose ring scream Mission of Burma's, “That's when I reach for my revolver! That's when it all gets blown AWAY!”

The track du jour was “Ever,” a raucous song by the Lemonheads that had reminded me of sound-check feedback the first time I heard it. But over time, it slowly revealed its layers of melody. Passing the joint to Max, I considered his thesis.

“It
is
a love song, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” he wheezed before releasing a cloud of smoke. “It sounds raw, right? Like he's angry.”

“Right. But the lyrics are so sweet,” I sighed. “Like, he loves her so much.”

Max handed the joint back to me and grinned. “I told you it was a love song.”

An hour later we were at Sean's house. Sean was Max's best SHARP friend in New Braunfels. We'd met a few times, but
he'd remained pretty icy toward me. Sean met us in the foyer, where he hugged Max and shook my hand, which always seemed less like a greeting and more like something I had to do to avoid being bludgeoned.

“What's up?” Sean asked, his white-blond hair cropped to the skin.

“What's up?” I replied, two octaves deeper than my actual voice. Sean walked ahead of us as Max, calling me out on my vocal machismo, mimed a squatting, orangutan-ish muscleman.

“Stop it,” I whispered, backhanding his arm.

A dozen people, mostly SHARPs, milled around Sean's house. Each of them shook Max's hand as he towered above them; they greeted him in voices I would've sworn were also unnaturally deep. At the dining-room table, a SHARP ripped the cap off a bottle with his teeth while another passionately read some manifesto aloud from a book. In the living room, a short, shirtless skinhead was repeatedly lifting cinder blocks as a small cluster of guys counted. There wasn't a girl in sight. It was a penitentiary variant of my high school locker room.

Don't look down. Don't look down. Maintain eye contact
.

“Max,” I whispered in the kitchen, “don't these guys know that this is the hottest gay bar ever?”

“Hahaha! Crabb!” Max banged on the counter.

“I'm serious. They're like every boy I ever liked in a photo of a Joy Division concert, but on steroids!”

Max leaned his head back with his mouth wide open. Not a sound came out for five seconds. Then, suddenly, a deep, hornlike blast of laughter boomed out. “Haaa . . . Haaa . . . Haaa . . .”

“Don't any of these guys have girlfriends?” I asked, opening a soda.

“Dude,” Max composed himself, “a lot of them are straightedge.”

“I know that means they can't get fucked up, but they can't have sex either?”

“Yep. But weren't rules made to be broken?” he said, flicking his tongue around the rim of his beer bottle. “Which one you want me to hook you up with, sexy?” Max started pretending to go down on the bottle. I tried to contain my laughter, fearing that Sean or one of his friends would walk in. “How about Sean?” he asked. Max turned to the counter and begin to hump it, slamming a drawer over and over again while moaning, “Oh, Sean. Fuck me harder!”

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Sean, appearing suddenly in the kitchen doorway and visibly perplexed by the scene.

“Oh man, I can't find a bottle opener anywhere in here,” said Max, fumbling through the drawer he'd just been fucking.

Sean looked at Max, and then at me, and then back at Max. “It's right there on the counter.”

“Oh,” Max said, holding up the opener and crossing his eyes. “Duh!”

“Come check something out,” Sean asked Max.

“Okay. Come on, Dave.”

“No. Just you,” said Sean, glaring at me.

Max rolled his eyes and handed me his beer. “Okay. I guess this is top-secret SHARP business.” He winked at me and followed Sean from the kitchen.

Five minutes into exploring the photos on Sean's fridge, I thought I saw Max over my shoulder. I turned to show him a funny picture of Sean as a baby. “Aw. He was so cute.”

But it wasn't Max. It was two guys I'd never met.

“Oh, hey. I thought you were someone else.” I could hear the pitch of my voice plummet so deep it sounded like a belch.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked the cinder block lifter.

“Oh, I'm friends with Sean. I mean—”

“You?” he asked incredulously. “Sean's friends with
you
?”

“Well, we're not, like, best friends forever.” I heard the words come out of my mouth and imagined myself in their eyes as a thirteen-year-old girl with an armful of Beanie Babies.

“Well, we've never seen you around here before.” They both took a step forward.

“Hey!” The deep baritone of Max's voice was like a foghorn. He stood in the doorway, with Sean dwarfed by his side. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh, we were just talking to this guy, Max,” said one of them. The other nervously repeated, “Yeah, we were just talking.”

“His name is David,” said Max, adding sternly, “you two should introduce yourselves.”

And then, in the most forced pleasantry I'd ever been party to, each of them shook my hand, their voices quivering. The cinder block lifter's hand shook in mine as I said, “Hello. I'm David.”

As quickly as we'd met, they fled the kitchen, presumably to open more bottles with their teeth and weightlift lumber.

“David, come down here,” said Max. “I gotta say bye to these guys.”

I followed him down the hallway and into Sean's room, where half a dozen guys sat in a circle. In one of their hands was a small black gun. I'd seen rifles in person before, but never a pistol, like the ones cops had on TV shows. The boy holding it noticed me and quickly wrapped it in a small cloth.

“Who's he?” I heard him ask as Max said good-bye. I wasn't sure I wanted him to know.

When we got back to Max's house, the entire place smelled heavenly. His mother, Ruth, stood in the kitchen flipping burgers, her salt-and-pepper hair in a long ponytail.

“Well, hello, boys!”

“Hi, Ruth,” I replied, noticing the dinner spread on her dining-room table.

“I was just cooking for me and the girls,” she said as Max's two little sisters cut lettuce and tomatoes behind her. “But there's more than enough.”

“Oh, I can't stay. My mom wants me home by six.”

“But it's summertime. Is this some special dinner or something?”

“No, it's just . . . My mom is being a little . . .”

“Mom, David was a really bad kid last year,” laughed Max.

“Shut up,” I said, snapping him with a dinner napkin. “It's my curfew, and . . .”

“Nonsense,” Ruth said, picking up the phone. “What's her number?”

“Ms. Fell, um . . . I can't—”

“Two. One. Oh . . .” Max interrupted, shooting me a smile as he recited my number.

Our mothers must have talked for half an hour as Max and I played cards at the dining-room table. I could hear my mom cracking jokes on the other end of the line.

“Uh, I think you're staying for dinner,” said Max with a wink.

“You're actually staying overnight,” said Ruth as she hung up the phone.

“But I can't, or my mom . . .”

“I told your mom that there are bars on all the windows and a moat around the house.”

Max laughed loudly with a mouth full of hamburger and hugged his mom as he passed behind her. “You're a fucking riot, Mom.”

Noticing my worried face, Ruth patted my hand. “Seriously, I told her that by the time we eat and watch a movie it'll be too late to drive. I also told her that I'm a single mom and could really use some help moving topsoil in the morning.”

“See? She fucking puts you to work,” yelled Max.

“Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck him,” replied Ruth. “Your mouth is like a fucking sewer, son.”

They laughed together in a way that made me miss my own mom. After dinner, Max popped the Lemonheads cassette into the kitchen stereo and started cleaning up. The house felt full and warm, the sound of the TV clashing with the Lemonheads in the kitchen and Max's sisters giggling down the hall.

I was in someone else's home in a space I barely knew, but as Max leaned against the counter and smiled at me, it felt like exactly where I was supposed to be.

One thing I prided myself on during my teens was my luxurious hair. Sometimes I parted it on the left. Sometimes I parted it on the right. I was unpredictable like that. But it's styling, for the most part, always followed the hair choices of Depeche Mode's sexy lead singer, Dave Gahan. On the left I was sporting an over-gelled “Violator”-era short-do. (In retrospect, it looks less dangerous and more “Rick Astley.”) On the right I was into Depeche Mode's more grungy “Songs of Faith and Devotion” album, hence the Jesus-y locks and sultry smizing.

M
y mother held the pillowcase from Sylvia's bed against her chest.

“It looks like Tammy Faye Bakker had a run-in with my linens!”

“Mom, quiet!” I whispered as Sylvia and Greg ate breakfast in the next room. “She'll hear you.”

“I don't care if that girl hears me. She needs to wash her face before bed,” she exclaimed, shaking the black-and-red-smeared pillowcase in front of her. “I think I'll have to
burn
this!”

Sylvia's morning face was such a mess that it looked like a demon was eating eggs in our living room: blood-smeared lips tore bacon in half as bloodshot eyeballs peered up from two charcoal-encrusted holes.

“Breakfast is great, Teri!” she yelled from the couch.

“See, Mom? She's trying to be nice,” I insisted. What my mother didn't understand was that the sprawled-out girl watching
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
with a plate of food resting on her massive boobs was simply making herself at home. “She likes it here, Mom. She likes you.”

“Well, she could have a bit more decorum.”

“But Mom, we're all in our pajamas. We're just relaxing.”

“Is ‘relaxing' what you were doing out in the pasture until 3 a.m.?”

I could've answered honestly by saying, “No, Mother. Last night we were on ecstasy and Sylvia forced us to chase a cow she thought was a reincarnated shaman.” But that wouldn't have gone over well. So I said, “Mom, we were just looking at the animals. Greg and Sylvia don't get out to the country much.”

“Well, they're odd. And you know your mother loves odd people. But really . . .”

“Mom, you promised you'd be cool if I had some San Antonio friends visit.”

“I am being cool,” she said, aggressively setting the timer on the washing machine, “but I don't see why they can't be well-mannered like that Max.”

“I know, Mom. You love Max. Geez . . .”

“He is delightful and polite,” she said, dreamily holding a box of detergent to her chest. “He's so handsome and considerate. And his mother is a treasure.”

Whenever my mother began to swoon over Max in relation to my San Antonio friends, a part of me wanted to interject with tales of Max stealing whiskey, and night-driving with the
headlights off. He had the whole Eddie Haskell thing down. But whereas Eddie Haskell was a dick, Max was actually a great person. He just happened to have a penchant for hard drinking, whippit-huffing, and waking blackouts.

“Hello?” I heard Max say from the back door. My mom's face lit up as Sylvia zipped past us like a comet.

“Bitch, my face isn't on!” she screeched, locking herself in the bathroom.

“More like her face came off,” whispered my mother, “all over my sheets.”

I walked into the living room, where Max was standing with Greg, who looked up cautiously in his oversize sweatpants and giant New Order T-shirt.

“I've heard a lot about you, Greg. Glad we could meet.”

Max towered over Greg in a way that made it look like they were different species. Greg readjusted his headband and tried to seem butch, which I was becoming an expert at. Seeing Greg attempt it with Max made me grin, wondering if I looked that hopeless when I tried.

“Hey bro,” said Greg as they extended arms, his purple fingernails and assorted rings disappearing in the gargantuan catcher's mitt of Max's hand.

“Max!” sang my mom, throwing her arms around him. “Are you hungry, son?” she asked, her head barely coming up to his chest. “I swear he's a bottomless pit,” she chirped with a smile to Greg, who had the fearful look of someone expecting to be sucker punched at any moment.

“Hey y'all,” said Sylvia, turning the corner in a black smock, having put her full face on in record time. “Max! It's a pleasure to meet you,” she cooed, peeking around newly platinum bangs.
Sylvia was in man mode—her voice huskier, boobs higher, and mascara even heavier than usual.

As my stepfather entered the room to greet everyone, I was struck by this odd collision: all these disparate people coming together in a tiny house off a dirt road in Seguin, Texas. Sylvia flirted with Max while Mike made coffee and Greg helped my mom clear the table. Things had been compartmentalized somehow, but right at that moment, every part of me seemed like they could coexist: Sylvia's drug buddy, Greg's gay copilot, my mother's son. And most of all, Max's best friend. He stood in the center of the room like a colossal lighthouse, shining a light that each person responded to; even Greg was starting to relax.

Six hours and a hit of acid each later, we were at Max's house in New Braunfels, greeting the arriving guests. My mom didn't know that Max's mother had taken his sisters out of town for a trip. As Greg's acid kicked in, I could sense his anxiety building over each shaved head that came through the front door.

“David, there are so many skinheads here,” he said, looking around at thirty or so SHARPs as they milled around.

“Mama like!” purred Sylvia, gliding onto the couch beside us. “Girl! No wonder you hang out with these fellas, fagotron!”

“I'm mainly just friends with Max,” I said.

“Well, duh, Crabb! Look at him!” Sylvia stared him down across the room. “I wanna climb him like a mountain! Girl, he's just so damn big!” I looked at Max through her eyes, at his broad shoulders and thick, strong neck. He wasn't all muscle, but he wasn't all fat. He was large, hard, and impenetrable, but dopey and soft too.

He noticed us looking and mouthed, “You doin' okay?”

“Hot damn!” whispered Sylvia, before mouthing “Just fine” to him with a wink. “David,” she shuddered, “he makes me feel like a whore in church on Sunday.”

“Sylvia,” said Greg, his voice trembling, “I'm glad you feel secure enough to go into slut mode right now, but I'm fearing for my life.”

“Oh gawd, bitch,” moaned Sylvia, rolling her eyes, “we get it. You went through something. It was traumatic. Yada yada yada . . .”

“Greg, they're not racists, they're SHARPs,” I said, explaining their entire manifesto to him as Sylvia and I shared a joint.

“Yeah, but they're not marching in pride parades, either,” replied Greg, making a point I often overlooked. “Just because they're not racists doesn't mean they like gay people.”

“Yeah, but none of them is going to do anything because I'm Max's best friend,” I explained. Greg shot me a slightly hurt look. “Oh, come on, Greg. You know what I mean. I'm . . . protected, I guess.”

“Damn, Gina,” said Sylvia, lighting up a joint. “It's like you're Whitney Houston in
The Bodyguard
.”

A few minutes later Max walked over with Sean, who was stern and joyless as usual.

“Hey,” said Max, “this is my best friend, Sean.” I heard him say
best friend
and realized how I'd just made Greg feel.

“I'm Sean,” he said, and paused, midhandshake with Greg. “Oh fuck. I know you.”

“Um . . .” Greg swiped his bangs behind his ear and looked down at the carpet.

“Dude,” said Sean, “this is one of those kids from FX.”

“What?” I asked, refusing to hear what I'd just heard.

“Oh shit,” said Max. “I thought I remembered you, Greg. You're the blue-Docs guy.”

We all froze. Sounds came from Greg's mouth—none of them words so much as slight, guttural hiccups. For a moment I reconsidered that familiar connection I'd felt with Max. Maybe there was no magic at work, just creepy synchronicity.

“Greg, I'm sorry.” Max reached out to Greg with an open hand. “That was a long time ago. I was fucked up. But it's no excuse. I'm really, really sorry.”

Sean chuckled to Max. “Dude, we were drunk. It's not the end of the world you beat up some—”

“Shut up,” barked Max.

Sean closed his mouth and looked at the ceiling as Greg shook Max's hand. With sudden force, Max pulled Greg in close and hugged him. Greg looked at me, confused, his face smashed against Max's chest.

“I'm so fucking sorry, brother,” said Max. “Apologize,” he said to Sean, turning Greg to face him.

“But I was drunk and he was—”

“Fucking apologize.” Max wasn't asking anymore.

Awkwardly and with visible resentment, Sean stammered, “I'm really . . . sorry.”

“For what?” demanded Max.

“Geesh,” sighed Sean. “I'm sorry we beat you up and took your boots. Okay?”

“Now shake hands,” demanded Max. The two of them shook hands and Sean stomped off into the party. “I'm sorry that happened, Greg. It wasn't right.”

“It's fine. It's over,” said Greg as Max opened a tall boy and downed the whole thing in one gulp. After hugging and apologizing
to Greg a few more times, Max walked back into the party, shaking his head and staring at the floor. I watched him shuffle away drunkenly, his big shoulders sadly sloped like a morose giant vanquished from a magic kingdom.

“One word, bitches: fuckable,” said Sylvia.

“I think he crushed my shoulder blade,” said Greg, bending his neck back and forth as Sylvia passed him the joint.

“Damn, Crabb,” said Sylvia. “Are you sure he's straight?”

“What?” I said, her question taking me by surprise.

“What are you, deaf, Mizz Keller? I said, are you sure that fine piece of man meat is straight? Don't tell me you haven't tried. You spend all your time together. You never call me anymore. You go to parties with him and stay at his house all the time.”

“So?” I asked.

“David,” interjected Greg, “you're obviously into each other. Duh.”

The two of them looked at me with the clearheaded certainty of someone telling a child, “The sky is blue.” Maybe everything Max and I were feeling wasn't as simple as brotherhood. Although I knew Max was attracted to women, he'd never said he
wasn't
attracted to men. I looked at him across the room, tilting his head back and sucking the last drop of beer from his bottle. The kitchen light hit the back of his head in a way that made every striation of muscle in his neck visible. I watched the mound of his bicep flex as he lifted another bottle of beer to his mouth, his lips wrapping around the rim. I tried to keep my brain and libido from venturing to the place I quickly realized they were taking a trip to.

David, this is not an option
.

My chest started to tighten as I realized how high I was. It felt like a weight was resting on my lungs. Greg and Sylvia were
chatting too fast to each other in a language I couldn't understand. I slipped outside and walked into the front yard, looking up at the stars and trying to catch my breath. Squealing tires at the curb thirty feet away caught my attention. The doors of a maroon van all opened at once, each producing a skinhead.

“Hey faggot!” one of them yelled, advancing quickly. These weren't SHARPs. These were the skins Max had told me about. Each one was holding a baseball bat or a knife. More boys emerged from the van, like it was the most terrifying clown car ever.

“Get the fuck in here!” yelled Max.

I turned and ran toward the porch as the skinheads gained behind me, one of them screaming, “Get that little faggot!”

Max grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. Ten skinheads stood in a line in the front yard as everyone at the party gathered at the windows to look outside.

“Oh bitch,” whispered Sylvia, her eyes darting back and forth. “I'm too high for this shit, Minerva.”

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck,” repeated Greg.

“Give him to us!” I heard one of the skins yell.

This was it. All my fears about Max's social circle had come to fruition. I had interfered with a group dynamic I should've stayed out of. Even worse, I had dragged my friends along.

“Oh fuck, Max,” I whispered. “I'm sorry.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked, looking through the blinds.

“Well, if you have to surrender me,” I answered.

“Dude, you're as high as I am drunk. They don't want you, David. They want him.” Max pointed to the back of the kitchen, past thirty kids, where a gangly African American SHARP named Reggie cowered in the corner.

“Give him to us and we won't fucking destroy your house,” yelled the skins' leader.

“Where's the gun?” I heard a SHARP whisper from the back of the room.

“No,” I said, instinctively grabbing Max's shoulder.

“Who gives a fuck what you think?” said Sean, bouncing up and down with crazy eyes. “These guys are gonna fuck us up!”

I looked around the house and saw at least forty kids: mostly SHARPs, a few punks, maybe a goth or two. They reminded me of all our friends that night at FX when Greg was beaten up. I looked back outside at the ten skins in the front yard.

“There are so many more of us,” I said to Max.

He looked at me and then over his shoulder at the party. “Yeah. Let's just all go outside.” Max didn't look much more confident than I was, but the math was on our side. And whatever would keep the gun out of the equation seemed preferable.

“We're going outside,” he said sternly to Sean, “without the gun.”

“This shit is too intense for me, Minerva!” bawled Sylvia, her bloodshot eyes bouncing up and down in their sockets.

Max stood up and, with the intensity of General Patton, declared, “We're going outside. And we don't say anything.” One by one and without question, each person stepped onto the porch. After all, Max was the mayor of freaks. A minute later, all of us were face-to-face with the group of skins, whose size and threat seemed puny by comparison.

“Where's the nigger?” yelled the leader, twisting the grip of the bat in his hand.

We stared at him in silence. He asked again and still wasn't answered. I could feel the heat of our collective glare intensify as
we looked down from the porch on the group of intruders. Some of the skinheads started to retreat, their machismo disappearing as they realized how many of us there were. We all moved forward on the porch, up against the railing, the mass of us making the waterlogged wood creak and moan beneath our feet.