Bad Kid (23 page)

“You have really beautiful eyes,” he said, his face a foot from mine.

The last thing I remembered before passing out was Max saying that he knew what I wanted. I really hoped he didn't.

As the summer continued, my feelings for Max became more intense, but I didn't know how to process them because I wasn't sure what they were. When Greg and I would go to the Bonham Exchange and watch strippers or check out guys at after-parties, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted from them. I built a small shrine to Keanu Reeves after seeing
My Own Private Idaho
, imagining him to be a delicate lover and an ideal long-term companion. Our fantasy relationship involved a lot of wine, poetry, and travel. Marky Mark would be my closeted booty call. It would only happen once a month, when he came through town, and I'd keep it a secret if I knew what was good for me. I could project myself into a myriad of sexual scenarios with the models from the
International Male
catalog, most of which took place to a sound track by Nine Inch Nails.

When I'd been Greg's best friend, not being able to kiss him had felt like a constant thorn in my side, to the point that being in his presence sometimes felt like torture. But Max was different. I would miss him and ache to hear the sound of his voice, but as soon as I was in his presence, any negative feeling subsided. It wasn't so much that I needed to touch him. I just needed to know that he was close enough that I
could
.

Wanting to be near him was fine, but I kept thinking that I should be wanting less and
doing
more. I was a gay seventeen-year-old who'd just come out to his family. I was supposed to be meeting guys and flirting with them and . . . other stuff. Being an
adult gay male surely meant having lots of sex, everywhere, all the time: in beds, on couches, in backyards, in club restrooms, in the backseats of cars. But instead of going to the Bonham with Sylvia or tracking down my gay friends in San Antonio, I was constantly hanging out with a heterosexual skinhead in a tiny town surrounded by aggressive straight guys, males who were so suspicious of my presence that Max had to be my bodyguard. That couldn't be good for my burgeoning sexual identity.

What did it mean that kissing and touching Greg had felt like nothing, yet just being at arm's length from this utterly unattainable boy made me feel like my head was spinning? And as unlikely a lover as Max seemed, why was he hanging out with a tiny goth gay boy? He laughed at all my jokes, hugged me every ten minutes, and had me practically living in his bedroom for half the summer. He told me I had beautiful eyes, for Christ's sake! What heterosexual boy tells a homosexual boy that he has beautiful eyes while lying in bed with him? (Well, maybe one who'd been huffing furniture protector every night since the summer started.)

After that night, I felt an increasing discomfort. Over the next few weeks with Max I became distant: watching myself watch Max, doubting my intention when patting him on the back after he cracked a joke, scanning the room of SHARPs to make sure no one had seen me looking at Max's lips or hands or butt while he talked to someone else. Sylvia sensed it. Sean seemed suspicious. My own mother forced condoms on me simply because I was going to Max's house. It was that obvious. And I had to make sense of it all somehow.

It was the end of July. In a month, school would start. Max was driving me into the sunset with the Lemonheads playing as I processed all these thoughts over and over again in a loop.

“What's wrong, my little Sequined Matador?” Max asked. He rested his hand on my shoulder and it felt like it was burning through my shirt. I leaned forward and turned down the stereo so that his hand would slip away. I had reached a threshold with the amount of physical contact I could receive from him.

“Max, do you like me?”

I could feel my heartbeat begin to race as he leaned forward to turn off the stereo.

“Well, hmmm . . .” Max scratched the little bit of hair on his chin and cleared his throat. “There's a few things,” he began slowly while staring ahead, like someone delivering a book report from memory. “No one makes me laugh as much as you do. And I wish you were part of my family. Like, my mom really likes you, and, uh . . .” Max grinned at me and quickly looked away, squirming in his seat a bit. “I guess what I'm saying is, if I
was
gay that would be awesome. Like, I would be your, uh . . . boyfriend for sure, but . . . I'm not,” he said with a nervous smile, each cheek dimpling as he morphed into my big toddler skinhead. “I just really like you.”

Then he reached out, turned up the stereo, and, in a tuneless baritone, sang the entirety of the Lemonheads'
Lick
album to me.

I had my answer. I could breathe. After weeks of confusion and mixed signals, Max had alleviated all my fears and doubts. I could finally relax, knowing nothing was ever going to happen between us. And in that clearheaded moment following his answer, I looked at his sunlit face singing to the road ahead of us and thought,
Oh, wow. I am so in love with you
.

Warm leatherette:

Here I am in my 1987 baby blue Mercury Lynx. Or as Sylvia called it, “A poor man's Ford Escort.”

D
avid! You have to phone that girl!” My mother had been deflecting Sylvia's calls for weeks. “Honey, your mother cannot handle another desperate call from her. I've given her advice about her brassieres and ingrown toenails and counseled her through a breakup with a bisexual man named Linus,” she complained. “Call her, if only to say, ‘Leave my poor, sweet mother alone!'”

I called Sylvia that afternoon to catch up. She was broke, single, and lonely. I knew this was all her own doing, but I still felt bad for her. I couldn't find it in my heart to deny her invitation to visit, especially since she still didn't have a car.

“Mom,” I asked, “can I go visit Sylvia for just one night?”

“School starts in two weeks and you've been well-behaved all summer. So I'll let you have this one last hurrah.”

I didn't tell my mom that the reason I seemed so well-behaved was the chemical stupor I was in from my daily huffing of household products, but I took her up on her offer and drove to San Antonio that night. It would be a relaxing evening in, catching up with an old friend. A night away from my brother-friend-husband-roommate, Max, might help me work out the increasingly tight knot in my heart.

“It's ninety-nine degrees, bitch,” said Sylvia as she handed me a Dr. Pepper. “You look like you just jumped out of the river.”

“My AC broke,” I said, gulping down half the soda before holding it against my sweat-soaked chest.

“Girl, you are just simple white trash with no AC,” she said, curling up on a tan recliner covered in cat hair.

“It's probably broken because you sucked all the Freon out.”

“At least Ryan has central air-conditioning here.”

“Well, Sylvia. At least I have my own car,” I replied, chugging the rest of the Dr. Pepper.

Sylvia had been sleeping at her friend Ryan's apartment for a week, ever since Ray-Ray had kicked her out.

“Yeah, girl,” she said, with Voltaire in her lap. “He passed out at a party one night, so I took out a Sharpie and wrote all over the bitch. ‘MISS THANG' on his forehead and pentagrams on his ass cheeks. He was
not
happy!”

“Sylvia, that's horrible,” I said, trying to stifle my laughter at the thought of Ray-Ray's frightful reflection greeting him the next morning.

“I know, Minerva. But I was just havin' a little fun,” she said, getting up to pour herself a vodka tonic. “So he lost a few days of work at Dairy Queen! They should loosen up their dress code.
Who's to say it wouldn't be a treat to order a Blizzard from a queen with penises scrawled on his cheeks?” Sylvia almost toppled over laughing at her little prank.

“Sylvia, are we the only ones here tonight?”

“Yep,” she sighed, plopping down in her chair/recliner/bed.

“Oh, great. Then we can just bring home burgers from Wendy's and hang out!”

“Bitch, are you crazy?” she said. “We're going out tonight, Minerva!”

“But Sylvia . . .”

“Don't give me no lip, bitchface!” she demanded, stamping out her cigarette so hard that the ashtray spilled over the arm of the chair. “Goddammit! See what my life has been like? Just one bad thing after another! No job. No place of my own. No man and no friends!”

“Well, what about Greg?” I asked. “He hasn't answered his phone in weeks. I assumed y'all were going out and having fun.”

“Fun?” she hissed, scooping the butts off the carpet. “I heard Greg went to rehab.”

“Greg went to
rehab
?”

“Bitch, are you serious? It was almost two months ago!” she barked, furiously scrubbing the carpet. “Shit went down while you were off in Hicksville with your new daddy.”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

“Look!” Sylvia was wild-eyed and angry. “You've been MIA. Greg's parents moved him to Alamo Heights High School, and he's a . . . Well, he's a . . .”

“He's a what?”

Sylvia clutched the invisible pearls around her neck. “He's a ‘prep' now.”

“No!”

“Yes, Minerva,” she sighed, as if he'd been murdered. “I saw him in Alamo Heights the other day in a car full of Bowheads listening to Celine Dion. It was awful, David!”

“Oh Sylvia, that's horrible.”

“That's what happens when you leave your friends high and dry, Crabb,” she said, stomping to the kitchen to refill her vodka. “So we
are
going out tonight.
Capisce
?”

“But I wanted to catch up and just chill.”

Sylvia stared at me from the kitchen counter as a fiendish smile spread across her face.

“What? What is it?” I asked. Slowly, she lifted her finger to point at the empty Dr. Pepper bottle beside me. “No,” I said. “You didn't.”

“You ain't gonna chill tonight. I spiked that Dr. Pepper with two hits of Golden Purse acid!” she exclaimed excitedly, the way you'd wish a five-year-old “Happy Birthday!”

The next few hours were a speedy blur. Golden Purse sounded like a fairly benign name for a hit of acid. Unfortunately, my golden purse was full of nightmares and razor blades. Something foreign and insidious loomed around every corner of Ryan's dark apartment. As I begin to peak, every synaptic center of my brain shut down, as if I was checking out of my own consciousness. I became an emotion-free robot: superfocused, task-oriented, and humorless. I moved quickly through each action like it was part of my programming, like my mind was simply following my body through an endless list of small activities without free will.

Pour a glass of water. Drink the water. The walls seem to be moving. The cigarette between your fingers is growing longer. Your hands
look strange. Look into the mirror. You are hideous. Allow Sylvia to apply concealer, blush, and mascara to your broken face. You are now wearing the mask of a gorgeous stranger with lips that sparkle. Each of Sylvia's breasts has a giant pink eye that will always know if you're lying. So you will allow her to dress you in her clothes. Now you are driving her in your car. The roads are full of radioactive snakes and assorted vermin. The convenience-store cashier has a harelip and might be Jesus. He knows you're a liar, but he loves you anyway. Where is your bracelet? Has anyone seen your bracelet? It was just on your wrist. Harelip doesn't like that you're crying now. Leave. Get out. Drive some more. Drive farther. You love this song. BUT WHY IS THIS SONG SO LOUD? The streetlights strobe through the car's interior as we pass beneath them. Sylvia is beautiful then hideous, beautiful then hideous, beautiful then hideous. She looks like the angel of death. But in a nice way. You know what? You never actually liked that bracelet. You can't feel anything. You can feel everything. How did gum get in your mouth? When will you die? How will you die? Why will you die?

Let's drive to Waco!

Driving, driving, driving . . .

Sylvia directed me off the highway and down a gravel road. The moon was beginning to set behind an airplane hangar–sized warehouse. We parked the car and walked into the tiny office attached to the front. From up a dark staircase in a thick Hill County drawl we heard, “How y'all doin'? Come on up!” As we ascended the staircase, I heard a deep, moaning hum. The rank, fetid odor of feces and something rotten filled my nostrils. A sixty-year-old man with a white handlebar mustache wearing a white ten-gallon cowboy hat welcomed us. He wore a crisp white suit and looked like the Weight Watchers' “after” photo of
Boss Hogg. He spread his arms like an angel inviting us into an unimaginable Elysium.

“Howdy, y'all! My name is Hank. What brings y'all to the Glendale Slaughterhouse this morning?”

I gripped the balcony and looked out over the endless expanse of cattle. Hundreds of cows were shoved against one another in a massive industrial barn. The hairs on my arm stood up as I thought,
That's just one huge animal in the shape of a big, flat, hairy blanket and it's going to grow larger and soon the whole world will be covered in beady brown eyes and pendulous, drooping udders and we will all be a part of one grotesque, bovine amoeba!

I could feel my face swell as I turned to Hank. The brim of his cowboy hat was moving in time with his lips as he tried to make awkward conversation. “It's pretty early for y'all to be here on a Sunday, ain't it?” he stammered, the stark white brim of his hat flopping up and down. “What can I do ya for?”

I know what's going on. Hank's hat is really who we're dealing with here. Hank's hat is the ventriloquist, the mastermind behind his entire identity. Hank is just a dummy!

I could tell that Hank's hat psychically perceived my realization as it began to move more violently atop his head. I wanted to scream,
Hank, look out! Your hat is eating your head!

As Hank stared at us, it occurred to me that I'd been thinking for quite a while. Neither Sylvia nor I had actually been answering Hank's questions. I wanted to say something, but no words came out of my mouth. I looked to Sylvia for help and saw her staring blankly down at the ground, biting her pinky nail and humming. I felt a sharp pain and realized that I'd just hit my pelvis with my fist, trying to beat a response out of my own
body. Above me I saw the Glendale Slaughterhouse logo painted on a corrugated metal wall: an image of a grinning, upright-standing cow offering forth a juicy rib eye on a silver platter with its hoofed hand. I thought,
Oh my God. Does that cow know what it is? Does it understand what it's serving? Is that cow a cannibal?

I turned to Sylvia in a panic. “Sylvia! Am
I
a cannibal?”

Sylvia turned to me like a deer caught in headlights, her face a throbbing psychedelic explosion of black and silver and red. Her mascara-clumped eyelashes looked like the legs of a dozen tarantulas. I realized that she'd brought us there with no game plan. My tour guide down the rabbit hole had become lost in the terrifying field trip of her own making.

Sylvia tried to answer Hank, fumbling with her purse as she piecemealed her story together in real time. “Uh . . . This is my brother and . . . uh, he's in the 4-H Club and, well . . .” Sylvia dug deeper into her purse as key chains jingled and zippers unzipped. “Well, I'm . . . Uh . . . Oh! I'm buying him a COW!” As she pulled out her empty checkbook, an impossible number of tampons exploded from her purse, like some kind of feminine hygiene fireworks display. No fewer than twenty of them rocketed through the air before landing on the metal-grate floor between Hank and us.

Hank stared at us like he was considering drawing his weapon. It occurred to me that he must have been really confused as to what two people like Sylvia and I were doing at the Glendale Slaughterhouse at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. How many boys with a future in agriculture wear rhinestone brooches and “Perfectly Pink” MAC lip balm?

“MOOOOOO!”

We looked over the balcony at a swollen, pregnant cow lying
on her side with a pool of blood coming from her back end. I could feel the strychnine in the acid tighten and shrink my guts into a knot the size of a tennis ball. The cow looked up at me with big, wet, tired eyes and let out a long, exhausted groan, as if to say,
There are days . . . and there are days
.

“Oh. Uh, sorry,” Hank said as he ran down the stairs. “Y'all wait here for a minute!”

As soon as he left, Sylvia threw her arms around me and began to sob.

“This is too much, girl! I can't handle it. I'm gonna have a conniption fit or a seizure or something!”

Just then, Hank appeared below us with a rifle. “Y'all might wanna turn away!”

I stared transfixed into the cow's eyes and for a brief, chemical-induced moment thought I could feel her psychically invade my mind. I could feel the pain of her long, confined life and empathize with what she'd endured and was about to experience. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't, hypnotized by the car crash but also feeling like I owed it to her to bear witness to this final humiliation.

I am a superfocused, task-oriented robot, and this is part of my program tonight
.

The bang of Hank's gun was so loud that it muted every sound after it. I was suddenly running—over the metal grating, down the stairs, through the gravel parking lot. I sprinted to my baby-blue '87 Mercury Lynx and jumped inside. As I shifted the car into reverse, I felt a combination of terror and elation that I had been born into the body of a human and not a cow. I was peeling out of the lot when I heard a familiar shriek and realized I'd forgotten something: Sylvia. In the rearview mirror I saw
her trip and fall in her four-inch heels. She became a whirling dervish of black gauze, spinning and struggling to regain her composure like Leatherface in that final, iconic scene from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

“Go!” she screamed, slamming the car door shut. “GOOOO!!!”

Twenty minutes later we silently shuffled back into Ryan's house, covered in a fine mist of sweat and dust, like zombies who'd been working construction jobs.

“I need to be alone,” said Sylvia, staring blankly at a spot on my chest through tear-filled eyes. “I'll be in my room for . . . forever.”

Down the hall, I heard Sylvia lock Ryan's bedroom door. I lay down on the couch, but my eyelids were superglued open. My guts were churning and my jaw was clenched so tightly that I thought my bite would shatter my teeth. I surveyed the living room, full of old pizza boxes and overflowing ashtrays. A water bong was knocked over in the corner and a pool of stinking pot-water had soaked into the carpeting around it. Fruit flies buzzed over a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. Everything was covered in cat hair and dust and smelled like musty tobacco.

Outside, I heard voices. I ran to the venetian blinds and cautiously peeked out, like someone in a crack house expecting a raid. Across the street, a husband and wife in their midthirties were walking down their sidewalk with their kids, a boy about three and a girl around seven. They were the picture of nuclear, suburban bliss. They looked fit and tan and well-rested. The kids giggled as their mom helped them into the backseat of their car. She was slender and petite, with long blond hair and a knee-length floral dress fitted at the waist. Her husband helped
her into the passenger's seat, kissed her on the cheek, and shut the door. He walked around the SUV to the driver's side while swinging his keys on his finger and whistling. He looked so boring in his stupid slacks. He was clean-shaven and wore a styled newscaster helmet of brown hair. I smirked and thought,
Wow. I will
never
be that boring. I will
never
be like them
.