Bad Kid (22 page)

“Come on, man,” said a skin to the leader as he jogged to the car. “This ain't good, man.”

I felt powerful, seeing these guys twice my size retreat in fear. Five minutes later, the skins left and the party resumed, bigger and louder than before. In the living room we gathered around Reggie and toasted him. Then we lifted him above our heads and passed him through the party, almost cutting off his nose with a ceiling fan. Greg located the three goth girls in attendance and sat chatting with them about hair dye while Sylvia showed a group of SHARPs how to make a marijuana pipe out of an apple.

At 4 a.m. I sat tripping with Max in the front yard.

“No, you do it like this,” he said, attempting to show me how to blow a blade of grass like a whistle.

“Like this?” I asked, attempting again but only making a flat fart sound. “I can't even whistle with my lips, Max. I suck at this. Maybe if—”

“Hey!” he slurred, covering my mouth with his hand. “I would never let a bunch of skins beat the shit out of you,” he said, swaying as his drunken gaze roamed from my face to my shoulder. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, because you have to protect your friends.”

“But you
are
my friend, you fucker,” he said, grabbing my face and staring into my eyes. “Listen, I'm really sorry about Greg. I was different then. Please don't think I'm an asshole.”

“Max, it's okay. We're really fucked up.”

“I just want to be a good person,” he said, making a clipped little whistle sound with his blade of grass. “I just want to be good.”

“But you
are
good,” I said, rubbing the back of his head.

“Please be my friend. Okay?”

“I
am
your friend, Max. I am.”

He leaned forward and pressed his face against my shoulder, his hand falling onto the grass as he began to black out. I rested my cheek against the top of his head and inhaled, laughing to myself at how much the gargantuan beast in my arms smelled more like a newborn than anything else: mild, clean, like baby powder.

As Max moaned the satisfying rattle of a deeply tired person surrendering to sleep, I noticed Sean on the front porch twenty feet away, glaring at me with his narrow, deep-set eyes as he stamped out a cigarette on the railing.

David, this is not an option
.

Here's Greg and me in my bedroom a few months after I moved to Seguin. Greg, unlike me, was wise enough not to style his hair into the shape of a mushroom. Greg had just helped me as any all-American boy would help his buddy: by building a small shrine to Keanu Reeves in his bedroom. We are presenting this against my newly white walls, which my mother had insisted I paint after getting spooked too many times while bringing in my laundry/going through my cinder-block shelving looking for drugs and cigarettes.

H
i, honey. Um . . . Okay, can you turn off that weird light that makes your teeth green?”

My mother stumbled through the black-light cave of my room with her arms full of laundry. “I wanted you to have clothes for Max's sleepover.”

“It's not a sleepover, mom. I'm seventeen years old.”

“Whatever you call it, then. A stay-over, or sleep-away, or . . . slumber party!”

“All of those are worse,” I said, throwing my duffel bag over my shoulder. “Okay, Mom. I love you, but Max's expecting me.”

“Of course he is. When are you going to bring him back over? It's been a month.”

“Mom, no one wants to come to Seguin. What are we gonna do? Go cow tipping?”

“Honey, your attitude about Seguin has got to change,” she
said. “Come September, you can't hang out in New Braunfels all the time, no matter how nice Max's mother is on the phone.”

“Just let me enjoy the rest of summer before I become a hillbilly,” I said, trying to evade my mom and get out of the house. “Just think, I could be hanging out with Sylvia.”

My mother wrinkled her nose like I'd shoved a rotten egg in her face. “Oh God! That little blonde nightmare.”

“I think it's lime-green now, actually.”

“Green, pink, paisley, whatever. You know she called again today?”

Sylvia had been calling me for a month, but I had been too busy hanging out with Max to call her back. My mother would intercept the call, only to be wrangled into a twenty-minute conversation with Sylvia about her dating life or the kitten she'd found or a movie she'd seen.

“Honey, that girl keeps me on the phone forever. I love people from all walks of life, but I just can't handle her. She's a bad influence!”

“Well, Max isn't a bad influence, right? His mom is nice, and he only lives fifteen minutes away.”

“His mother
is
really lovely,” she said as I stepped over the threshold and into the hallway. “Please give her the recipes I tucked into your bag.”

I paused in the doorway. “You went into my bag?”

“Well, yes. But it was empty. I was just . . .” She looked up dramatically and cleared her throat. “Okay, David. I need to tell you something.”

“Oh God, Mom.” I sighed and sat on the bed, preparing myself for an avalanche of confessional hand-holding and “feeling words.”

“It'll be fast. I promise,” she said, sitting on my bed. “Open and honest: I found your diary one day when I was arranging your sock drawer.” She paused and stared at me in silence for a moment before admitting, “Okay! I'm lying. I was violating your private space, looking for cigarettes and drugs. Anyway, I found your diary and—”

“Mom! You did
not
read my journal?”

“Oh, right. It's a ‘journal,' the ‘masculine,' because you're a boy, well, a
man
, really. Anyway, I read in your journal about some of your . . .
feelings
.” I got up instinctively, wanting to escape whatever was going to come from her mouth next. “Stay here, David. Let me finish. I know this is making you uncomfortable, but I'm your mother. I love you. We should be open with each other, open and honest. Now, your thoughts about Jake and his penis are nothing to feel bad about.”

“Oh God! Mom!”

“Honey, sit down. We all have desires,” she said, glancing to the parted bedroom door and whispering, “You know when Mother takes her ‘long baths'?”

“Mom! You have to stop talking now!”

My mother stood and proudly raised her chin. “I have needs as well, honey. All of what you're experiencing is totally natural and nothing to feel ashamed about.”

I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. “Mom, stop talking!”

“David! Come back here! I'm your mother and I love you just the way you are!”

My mom followed me to the car. As I started the ignition, she leaned into the window. “Honey, all I wanted to do is give you these.” And with that, three boxes of condoms fell into my
lap. “Max is lovely and in this day and age, even true love won't protect you from—”

“Mom! Max is just my friend. He likes girls!” I looked down at the variety of condoms in my lap and shoved them back into my mother's hands. “I'm only staying overnight. How much sex do you think I could even have in twenty-four hours?”

“Well, I had to get a variety because . . .” Unfortunately, I didn't drive away fast enough to miss the last part of her sentence. “ . . . I have no idea what your penis is like.”

In the rearview mirror I saw my mother in a cloud of dust, waving good-bye with boxes of condoms, yelling, “Think with the right head, sweetie!”

By 3 a.m., Max and I were sitting on Sean's kitchen counter, drunk.

“So, Max, where are Sean's parents?” I slurred as a party raged in the next room.

“Well, his mom's dead and his dad works nights at a jail,” he said, popping open his umpteenth beer. “Just two of the reasons he's such a dick.”

“You really think your best friend's a dick?”

“A. He's not my best friend. B. Yes. But most people are dicks, really.”

“That's kind of a downer, isn't it?”

“Thinking that makes things easier for me, because if everyone's a dick then everyone's hurt. And if everyone's hurt, then everyone is . . . I don't know.”

“Everyone is what?”

“Special, I guess,” he said, polishing off the beer he'd opened a minute earlier. “Like, if you meet someone and they seem super
nice, you just don't know the shitty parts yet. And the shitty parts are coming. Believe me. They always do.”

Max filled my red plastic cup halfway with rum, tossed me a Coke, and continued. “But if I meet someone who's a total dick right off the bat, then things can only get better, right? You have something to look forward to.”

“So I just haven't shown you my bad part yet, then, huh?”

“You're transparent,” he said, taking a long swig off the rum bottle. “I can already promise you your bad part is a fraction as bad as— Goddamn!” he yelled, his face wrinkling at the taste of the warm well-brand rum. “How do you drink this shit?!”

“Well, the ‘bad part' of me wants to tell you that you're a fucking moron for not putting it on ice with a mixer,” I said with a smirk. “But since I'm so transparent and you're the Buddha, you probably know that.”

Max smiled back and lit a cigarette. “You know what I mean, David. I know what you want, is all.”

He leaned beside me and threw his arm around my neck, pulling me in close to him. The drunken weight of his body pressed me against the counter.

“See, Sean,” he whispered in my ear, pointing over the kitchen bar into the crowded living room. “He wants discord. He likes problems. But once you get to know him, you realize that what he really likes is solving problems. He's just so fucking bored and uninspired in this bullshit town that he has to make problems to have anything to do.”

Max leaned his head against mine, slurring with half-closed eyes. “And Jennifer,” he said, pointing to a girl with a shaved head on the sofa. “She's a slut because her mom was a slut and her older sister was a slut. She wants someone to love
her, but she doesn't understand that you can't fuck your way to that kind of comfort. And Rocky,” he whispered, pointing to a tiny fourteen-year-old skinhead with freckles and ginger hair. “He acts all tough and is always coming to these SHARP parties trying to be cool. He's not actually one of us yet. He just wants a brother, I think. Wait . . . is his name Rocky?”

Max reached up and rubbed his head in thought, his fingertips grazing my head, which rested against his. As I looked up at his face, the rest of the party receded into a black hole; every voice turned down and every light faded. Everything behind Max slipped into a blur when he looked into my eyes. For a moment, I couldn't see past him.

Just then, a beer bottle shattered. In the living room, the little redheaded wannabe-SHARP was cutting his chest with a broken Heineken bottle, an attempt to flirt with Jennifer, who watched with come-hither eyes from the torn, dirty couch.

“See?” said Max, releasing me and letting out a huge belch. “I think that's our cue.”

Max stumbled behind me through the front door as Sean looked on.

“You boys leaving already?” he asked, placing particular emphasis on the lispy
S
in
boys
.

“Fuck you and good night,” exclaimed Max with barely open eyes.

Sean looked at him and laughed, immediately charmed out of saying whatever homophobic slur was coming next.

“Good night, Sean,” I said, smiling as I left. Sean shifted his focus to me and scowled, shaking his head, as if to say,
How dare you?

That night I lay in Max's bed about to go to sleep when he wandered in with a Guinness and an aerosol can.

“Max, don't you want to go to sleep? We're pretty fucked up.”

“Dave, it's only midnight. Come on, dude.”

He sat on the floor Indian-style and gulped the beer, half of which spilled onto his shirt. “Wanna do some Scotchgard?”

“That spray stuff you put on couches and leather jackets? How?”

“Like this,” he said, spraying the Scotchgard onto the bottom of his T-shirt and covering his face with it. He took a deep inhale and leaned back against his bed. “Do it, Dave,” he said, his eyes closing as his mouth slackened.

After a year of friendship with Sylvia, getting high this way seemed downright pedestrian. I sprayed the edge of the bedspread with Scotchgard, not wanting to stain my favorite Violent Femmes shirt or reveal any part of my naked torso to Max. I took a deep breath and immediately felt a numbing rush slip behind my eyes. The white noise of the room began to pulse in superstereo; a crashing wave of wah-wahs sped through my brain. VHS head cleaner had nothing on fabric and upholstery protector.

“David. Wake up.”

Max was shaking the back of my head. I had face-planted in the carpet and was drooling on his thigh.

“What? Shit . . . Did I pass out?”

“Yeah,” he said, a huge smile plastered on his face. “It happens. We should watch each other, okay?” He sprayed more Scotchgard onto his shirt.

“Max, you're going to do more?”

“Yeah. Sean and me do this back and forth for half an hour. It's total fucking euphoria. But if I pass out, you gotta wake me
up in a couple minutes. Just to make sure I don't have an adrenaline overdose and then a heart attack.”

“A heart attack?” I asked, dreary-eyed.

A million fairies were whizzing through my brain as the reggae music warped in and out of my aural field. I wanted to be concerned about Max's possibly having a heart attack, but my body felt too good to care.

“What is this reggae music you're playing?” I asked, the bass line twisting through my spine.

“It's nah raggah, iss duhhh,” Max moaned through his shirt.

“What?” I started to laugh. “I can't fucking hear you.”

“It's not reggae. It's dub!” he yelled louder through his shirt and laughed. Then he went silent, still upright but swaying with his eyes closed. His hands held the shirt up over his face, exposing his soft, tan belly and chest. I wanted to reach out and touch him; to wrap my arms around his body and hold him as tight as I could. He fell forward onto my crotch with a thud. His big, bald head rested right in between my legs. He murmured something and turned his head to the side. His shoulders pushed back against my thighs with each long, unconscious breath. Carefully, I reached down and placed my open palm against the back of his neck. I ran my fingers in circles on his scalp, which was soft yet sandpapery. I leaned down and ran my cheek along the side of his face, my ear grazing his. I always thought of Max as having brown hair, but this close to his skin I could see hundreds of fine blond hairs, like a smattering of gold dust across his skin.

Wait. Is he breathing?

I started shaking him violently, yelling, “Wake up!”

Max sprung up on his feet with such intensity that he smashed the top of his head on the ceiling.

“Oh God, Max! I thought you were dead!”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, rubbing his bruised scalp. “You have to be asleep for a long time!”

“But you were,” I said. Max looked at me doubtfully. “I think.”

Max delicately pushed me against the side of the bed, with his foot against my chest. “You fucker,” he grinned. “I'm going to get ice.”

After Max walked out, I crawled into his bed from the floor. I stared up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan, one of its four blades slightly askew. My temples were warm and pulsing in time with my heartbeat. All I could smell was Max, and I curled up in his comforter.

“Dude, you're not passing out,” said Max, walking in with a plastic bag of ice on his head. He grabbed the Scotchgard and sat on the bed next to me. “We've got a long night ahead of us.”

“More? How much of this stuff can you do at once?”

“I don't know,” he winked at me. “Let's find out.”

We lay in his bed groggily, laughing and trancing out on the music for a while, occasionally shaking each other awake from a puddle of drool. Eventually the conversation turned to our families.

“So you're in this shithole because your dad flaked on you?”

“He didn't flake,” I replied. “I fucked him over.”

“So you think he doesn't love you?” Max asked, spraying the last bit of Scotchgard onto his shirt.

“Not like he used to.”

“He will again, Dave,” Max said, covering my mouth with part of his shirt. “Take the last huff.”

As my brain became goo and my extremities went numb, I asked, “What happened to your dad?”