Desert Boys (15 page)

But one day my third-grade class had, for some reason, a sleepover party. The party wasn't actually held overnight; the kids were simply supposed to wear pajamas, bring toys, and pretend.

As far as I can remember, my father had never said the word “pajamas.” I'd only heard my mom say it, usually after coming home from work, when she'd tell my sister and me to join her in getting comfortable.

At one point during the pretend sleepover, I made all the boys laugh by asking which of the girls had the best
BJ's.
I didn't understand why they were laughing, but I enjoyed the boys' attention. When one of the girls told the teacher, no matter how much I cried and argued my innocence, Mrs. Chance issued me a demerit for using foul language. She said, “You're lucky I'm not calling your parents,” but that's what I wanted most in the world: for my mother to exonerate me, for my father, the Midwestern all-American, to tell me what I had done wrong.

3.
Drew Reuter, the boy across the street, was obsessed with professional wrestling. His favorite wrestler was a face-painted, arm-tasseled bodybuilder named Ultimate Warrior. Drew owned all the action figures, and let me play with every one of them except for the Warrior. We played in his front lawn, where the toys stood as tall as the wildest tufts of crabgrass. I was eleven years old and he was twelve when he asked if I wanted to play with Warrior. I said, “Heck yeah.” He pulled his penis from his shorts and said he'd let me play with Warrior if I licked him. Some other boy might've called him queer or punched him, but I felt my own erection forming. I remember thinking the penis and the stomach must be connected, because as my erection grew, my stomach shrank, turned hollow as the plastic muscles of the action figures. Now and then a car passed, and I timed my lick perfectly between them. Drew wanted more than the one lick, and I obliged. Soon he moved to his mother's house, and we never played together again.

4.
Otherwise, I had exactly zero sex in the Antelope Valley.

5.
When my sister was a sophomore in high school, and I was in the sixth grade, she waited until my parents were at work to bring home a boy named March. He was pale as a used golf ball and had recently shaved his head with a Bic razor. I could make out two fresh, bloody nicks at the back of his skull. When I caught him and my sister kissing on the patio swing in the backyard, Jean yelled at me to mind my own business. March told her I hadn't done anything wrong. This—a boy standing up for me—made me like him. When Jean went to the bathroom, he pulled me aside and said, “One day, you'll be a dude trying to get some pussy, and some little brother's going to get in your way.” He laughed. Then he asked, “Want to see my tattoos?” He lifted his shirt, and I saw a purple big-wheeler along his smooth white rib cage, a pair of crossed pool cues over a flaming eight ball, and a set of initials that read
NLR
. I asked what these stood for. “My crew,” said March. “My motherfucking crew, man.”

6.
The Nazi Low Riders tried to indoctrinate my sister. This is cheating—I didn't know this until after I left. March tried to tattoo Jean with a homemade needle, and my sister, from his couch, kicked him in the teeth and ran away.

7.
When I was ten, the only objects that really belonged to me were a few books and magazines, some video games, and a baseball signed by two famous and rich Dodgers. My dad had taken me to a convention center to get the ball signed, and when one of the famous and rich Dodgers asked what position I'd go on to play in the big leagues, I told him, “Home,” which made everyone laugh. My dad explained how we were just getting me started in the game, and that although I had a lot to learn, I seemed to love it and that's all that matters, isn't it?

The famous and rich Dodgers agreed. Love of the game was the difference between the good and the great. They didn't mention what kind of person was indicated by pleasant, yielding ambivalence.

One night—not much later, but long enough afterwards so that my father and I had stopped pretending I cared about sports—I decided to get rid of the signed ball. Maybe the baseball was a reminder of the heteronormative boyhood my father pined after for me, but the truth is I simply thought the baseball ugly. The sloppy, illegible signatures were scrawled in a hideous green ink, and the spherical shape of the thing itself didn't seem to belong with the rectangular shapes of my books, magazines, and video game cartridges. Even the furniture in my room was boxy and sharp, and the ball—a lone, edgeless blob—bothered me. I needed to get rid of it, and fast.

During my period of baseball-inculcation, I had seen the movie
The Sandlot,
and I planned an almost precisely opposite plot. I waited until my parents and sister had fallen asleep, opened my bedroom window as quietly as I could, and chucked the ball over the neighbor's wall. His yard was full of towering, wispy grass I'd always mistaken for wheat. My hope was that the ball would nestle at the bottom of that tall grass, and be lost forever.

And for a brief time, it was. I explained to my parents, tears in my eyes, how I'd taken the baseball to school. To show off. Somehow, on the walk home I guessed, the ball had fallen out of my bag. “Stupid!” I said, palming my forehead. My mom absolved me using the loving, passive voice: Accidents happen. A mistake was made. A lesson has been learned.

My father—who had probably taken the day off from work to take me to that Dodgers convention, probably spent more money on admission and gasoline for the drive than he'd spent on himself over the course of the month—only said, “That's too bad.”

Eventually—weeks later? a year?—the neighbor knocked at our door while I was at school. Having cleaned up his backyard, he discovered a baseball he assumed was ours. When I came home, my father was sitting on my bed, cradling the ball in his hand, careful not to touch the signatures.

“What's so bad about owning a baseball?” he asked. “What's so wrong with keeping a gift? And why would you lie? Who taught you to lie?”

I didn't know which question to start with. My answers—nothing, nothing, self-protection, innate ability—wouldn't have done much good anyway.

My dad stood and placed the ball back where it had been on my desk, alongside my books. He said, “You know I'm an excellent listener. Why won't you talk to me?”

8.
The Antelope Valley is not the California most people imagine. This could be a good thing, but almost never is. Instead, it's a point of pride, which is almost always claimed by people who are proud of the wrong things.

9.
Members of NLR, including March, were indicted for the murders of three black teenagers in East Palmdale. March is currently serving a life sentence in the California State Prison, Los Angeles County—fifteen miles from where he stabbed to death a fourteen-year-old black boy named Curtis Allen, a member of a rival gang called SHARP: Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

Redlining—discriminatory zoning restrictions I didn't understand until my late teens—effectively segregated town: east for minorities and the working class, west for the well-off whites. The Sharps seemed like the only people willing to change the place. That skinheads could even
be
black seemed to break down, for me, the central tenet of segregation: that certain people behaved in certain ways, and thus belonged together.

As a teenager, I considered joining the Sharps, but I was too small and too weak and too afraid to declare sides, let alone join a gang. Another way of saying this is I wanted everyone to like me.

10.
My friends and I dug trenches in the desert, shot each other with paintball and airsoft guns, built fires and jumped the flames on our bikes, forced each other to eat dirt and cactus and snake meat, rode our bikes to the aqueduct, ignored the signs warning of drowning, put our feet in the water, stripped off our clothes, sunburned on the cement slope, downloaded songs whose lyrics were growled, burned CDs, and, while collecting dented beer cans and abandoned bullet casings deep in the desert, listened through a boom box, growling along.

11.
My mother served me breakfast in bed every Sunday until I was fourteen years old. “For my
pashas,
” she said, calling me her prince.

12.
Everyone started driving pickup trucks and SUVs and taking up two parking spots apiece. Once I saw a black F450 diagonally block four spaces outside Wal-Mart. Dangling from the back of the truck, as if the symbolism weren't clear enough, was a giant set of chrome testicles.

13.
In the fall of 2001, Mom was working in Men's Suits at Dillard's. At least three times a week, she said, she helped a customer who, hearing her accent, asked to be helped by someone else. “They say they want a man's help.” She was wearing her pajamas as she told us this, but she was still the daughter of a tailor. “I've been altering suits for how long?” she asked no one in particular. “The reason is
me.
They hear my accent, think I'm Muslim. These
beeble
are idiots,” she said. “Don't they know what Muslims did to Armenians a hundred years ago?”

My dad laughed. “These people don't know what an Armenian
is,
” he said. “Honey, these people don't know there's such a
thing
as a hundred years ago.”

14.
My best friend, Robert Karinger, shot me with an airsoft gun on the left half of my upper lip, which swelled nearly to the size of my thumb. We were out in the middle of nowhere and all I wanted was ice. Karinger and Dan Watts both called me a faggot until I got tears in my eyes, which is when Karinger spat on the ground and turned away to shoot cans. Watts, feeling bad maybe, started to compliment the way the fat lip made me look. “Like a badass,” he said. “Like a boss.”

15.
People told me I didn't have a violent bone in my body, but they didn't know my bones vibrated to notes of violence like tuning forks.

16.
The word “faggot” became so ubiquitous among my friends that sometimes, when I'd slink off to the desert to lie alone in the dirt and let the universe rocket through me for a change, I'd whisper, “The stars are faggots, the moon's a faggot, the Milky Way's a faggot, but I'm no faggot.”

17.
Though we lived on the east side of town, my sister and I tested well enough to surpass the zoning restrictions and attend a better-funded west-side high school. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.

18.
After being shot, I wanted to see my dad—or, I wanted him to see me. My lip was still fat and sore and, from what I could see in my bike's chrome frame, turning a shade of plum. I rode out to the furniture store where he worked, and tethered my bike to a lamppost whose bulb, despite the hour or so left of daylight, sputtered on just as I disarranged the combination on my lock. Inside, my dad and two other salesman played cards at an overpriced oak kitchen table.

Dad introduced me to his coworkers, who looked up briefly from their cards to say hello.

“Slow day, huh?” I asked.

My dad said, “Just died down soon as you got here. Busy, busy beforehand.” I looked to his coworkers for confirmation, but they kept their eyes on their cards.

I lifted my chin, trying to catch the light on my fat, purple upper lip.

“Notice anything different?” I asked.

My dad took his time to study my face, raising an eyebrow when he gave up.

“I should get back,” he said. “See you for dinner?”

I asked if I could use the bathroom before heading out. He pointed me past the poker game into the back of the store. In the bathroom, I looked into the mirror and found that the swelling in my lip had gone down to about normal. The healthy pink color had returned. On my way out, my dad shouted a friendly, “See ya, son!” As I unlocked my bike, I checked my reflection again in the chrome. The plum color had moved to my forehead. I realized the color was on the bike, an old splatter from a paintball.

19.
My sister, visiting from college, told me my acne—spreading from my forehead to my throat, purple cysts studding my back, chest, and shoulders—wasn't “normal.” Jean said, “Everyone gets pimples, but your pimples are getting
you.
”

20.
I'd seen queer men on TV, and I made it a point not to let my wrists go limp, not to speak my
s
's like a cartoon snake. But one day, Roxanne Karinger told me I walked “different.” Recently I'd been fantasizing about her brother, and I was afraid she'd caught on.

“Different how?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Roxanne said. She was two years my junior, but her girlhood made me admire her and even want, at times, to be her. “Like, more of a bounce? Your heels never touch down.”

After that I walked in small, lazy steps. I leaned back and kept my weight on my heels. Took twice as long to get anywhere.

21.
My mom took me to a dermatologist and, after listening to his suggestions for medication, said, “He used to have the cleanest skin.” She hadn't said “smoothest,” she hadn't said “clearest.” She'd said, as if I'd neglected to bathe, as if my acne were the manifestation of a deep filth within me, “He used to have the cleanest skin.”

22.
Every fender in town carried a magnet in the shape of a ribbon to support the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once, in the Best Buy parking lot, forty-three magnetic ribbons adorned the bumpers and front grille of a yellow Hummer. By the time I walked past, the count had been reduced to forty-two.

I'd stolen the stupid magnet as a joke to myself, as a kind of silly protest, but when the Hummer's owner yelled at me from across the parking lot, I started to run. The owner caught me, tackled me to the curb along a parking-lot island filled with coconut-sized rocks and miniature cacti. I lay on my back, and the man stood, shoving his foot against my chest like a pro wrestler. In size and looks, he bore a striking resemblance to Danny DeVito, but he was strong, giving me just enough air to breathe. He plucked the magnet from me and said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”