Handsome

by Holly Lorka

  I wanted to say, “Mom, the population of my house has just decreased by half. I get by on two forks a week now. I’m all good in the cutlery department.” I wondered if she thought that having extra forks would make me more attractive to potential girlfriends. As in, I live in a world of abundance, ladies. Just open the utensil drawer and see.

  It’s a long time later and now I own (own, own, OWN!) both a spare bed and a kitchen table. Also a new dishwasher to wash all my forks. Abundance, I tell you!

  a legend on my own bus

  You can’t make up your own nickname. Everyone knows that. You can’t just walk into school one day and announce, “From now on, please refer to me only as Disco.” It doesn’t work that way. A nickname, like herpes, must be given to you by someone else.

  I never wanted herpes, but I always wanted a nickname. Or rather, I always wanted a good nickname. Some of my friends in grade school had them. Dawn Lieber was called Flash. She ran the fifty-meter dash faster than any of the boys. One day our gym teacher yelled out to her, “Go, Flash, go!” and the name stuck. We called her that all the way up through high school, and it always conjured images of supreme athleticism and speed, even though by senior year she weighed over two hundred pounds and smoked weed. And Matt Downy was Hubba. He chewed bubble gum constantly, so we named him after it. He could blow bubbles the size of Jupiter and regularly got the gum stuck in his hair. He laughed every time he was sent to the school nurse to get it out. His mom finally shaved his head.

  I was jealous of them. Their unique characteristics made them stand out from everyone else. They morphed into more than just silly little kids with bad perms and bologna sandwiches. They became legendary. Well, I too had a unique characteristic that I thought could make me legendary.

  Let’s talk about my penmanship: it was amazing.

  I was obsessed with handwriting. As a fourth or fifth grader, I felt it was the one individual mark I was capable of making on the world. Perfect penmanship was everything to me. I practiced and practiced with a finely stilettoed #2 Ticonderoga until every letter was the right height, the correct slant. I had a copy of the Bill of Rights in my bedroom, because that was the type of poster I was hanging on my wall at the time. I had it pinned up over my desk, and in the evenings I’d sit and painstakingly copy all the signatures at the bottom, over and over until I knew them by heart. John Hancock was my favorite because he had that “H” in there and it was fucking beautiful.

  Every assignment I turned in was given back to me with a comment about how nice and perhaps colonial it looked. Every time I signed my name on my grade school homework the angels sang. If you look at my Social Security card, which my parents let me sign around this time, you might think I was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1789. Penmanship. That’s what I had. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a good nickname. I could have been called Copyright or Inkwell, maybe even Scratch. But that’s not what happened.

  I was born to two people whose dental histories were savage. My mom lost all of her teeth at a young age to disease and wore complete dentures. I knew this because she would take them out and chase me screeching around the house whenever she wanted a good laugh. Though my dad had most of his own teeth, they were crooked and leaned around in his mouth like drunken sailors. I was fortunate enough to inherit this quality. When my permanent teeth came in, they erupted from my gums in an enamel bouquet, spraying out from my mouth with no regard for order. My upper teeth stuck out so far that I couldn’t close my lips over them. The kids on the school bus, recognizing my resemblance to a wood-gnawing rodent, gave me the nickname Bucky Beaver.

  The kids on the school bus. The Evil Bus Kids. There were five or six of them, all older than me. Bigger. Meaner. The huddled together in the back, a heaving mass of cackles and pointed fingers, making fun of anyone they could and laughing nonstop at each other’s jokes. They were always there, preying on any weakness, any imperfection. I never saw any of them at school, never saw them get on or off the bus. Maybe they lived on the bus. Maybe they toured around from district to district laying siege to kids like me, trying to get us all to cry. They were astute warriors; their most effective weapon was the sharply honed nickname.

  Every morning it was the same: when the bus stopped for me in front of my house and opened its doors, I would consider running away to Pennsylvania to live with the Amish people, where all the kids there were homeschooled and never had to ride the bus. While I was planning my escape, the driver would wave me on and tell me that she didn’t have all day, honey, and I would realize that I didn’t even know where Pennsylvania was. So, steeling myself, I’d climb in. Even though I would rush to get into a seat, looking downward to avoid making eye contact with them, the Evil Bus Kids would start on me immediately.

  I was an easy target. Because I couldn’t close my mouth over my teeth, my lips were always dry and I developed a habit of licking them constantly. The Evil Bus Kids picked up on this and bestowed upon me another nickname. They squinched up their yellow eyes, pursed their lips, darted their tongues in and out of their mouths, and called me Fofo Face. What even was a Fofo? I didn’t know, but it couldn’t be good. So, I was Fofo Face Bucky Beaver.

  Then I got braces. The Evil Bus Kids just kept tagging on the nicknames. I grew into Fofo Brace Face Bucky Beaver.

  My teeth were so bad that I had to wear headgear with my braces. Most kids only had to wear it at night, where its only consequence was an occasional bloody gouging if one turned over too hastily. My orthodontist, however, convinced my parents that my overbite was the worst he’d ever seen. The only way to defeat it was to wear headgear during the day as well.

  Kids will notice if you wear a cage on your face in the fourth grade. Especially the Evil Bus Kids. I became Fofo Brace Face Bucky Beaver in a Cage.

  Soon after sporting daily headgear, I began having trouble seeing the blackboard. While I was certain that the incarceration of my mouth was interfering with the blood flow to my eyes, the orthodontist assured my mother that the two were not related. Mom took me to the eye doctor, who prescribed glasses for me. When it came time to choose frames, I couldn’t get the ones I wanted: an average pair of brown frames with a Battlestar Galactica emblem on the side. That pair wasn’t on sale. What was on sale was a pair of pink plastic frames with eyeholes the size of tractor tires. As a bonus, blue tint was included with the lenses. Fantastic! Add that to my orthodontic ensemble and wonder why I didn’t just throw myself in front of the bus instead of getting on it every day.

  Then, my mom decided I should have a shag haircut. It was stylish in 1977—for adults, maybe even for fashionable teenagers. Not for a fourth or fifth grader like me. My hair was razor-cut to stick up in the top and front; the sides and back hung wispily and seductively over my pink goggles and headgear elastic. I went to school every day while my hair longed to do photo shoots for the cover of Cosmo. Everyone else had a regular stupid fourth-grade haircut. I was a freak. “Hey, Fofo Brace Face Bucky Beaver in a Cage with Four Eyes, does Rod Stewart know you have his hair?”

  It went on and on, all the way through middle school. I would go home crying to my mom, who would tell me not to worry because those kids would never amount to anything and would someday be pumping my gas. My dad’s answer was to take me into the garage and show me how to punch them in the breadbasket if they ever laid a hand on me. But they never touched me. They just ruined my life.

  Thanks to the Evil Bus Kids, I became legendary only for my bad teeth and awkward, though somewhat stylish, appearance. I wanted to be memorialized for my handwriting, but how could I convince the Evil Bus Kids? How could I get them to call me something that wasn’t completely humiliating? It seemed impossible.

  A few years ago, a colleague asked me if I had a nickname. There it was: an opportunity for redemption. A chance to right all the wrongs that were done to me on that stupid bus so long ago. My teeth were straight, my hair looked pretty good, my glasses were acceptable. My handwriting was s
till perfect. What did I pick? What have I been called now for the last five years at work? My coworkers go into my patients’ rooms and tell them what to call me before I introduce myself. When I go in, my patients speak first, to be funny.

  They say, “Good morning, Steve.”

  thug life

  This is the story of fourth grade. Fourth grade is easy for no one, but just look at the picture on the cover of this book and imagine how things were going for me. I was having a huge case of the struggles. I was being bullied for my teeth, my braces, my shyness, my shoes, and my overall existence. I also started writing shit down in notebooks, perhaps to use against people in stories when I got older. Do not fuck with the shy kid who likes English class, you evil bus fuckers.

  On the upside, my hair was amazing.

  In the fourth grade, I was pretty into my English teacher, Ms. Harmon. She was the first “Ms.” I’d ever met. Not a Miss or a Mrs.: far more mysterious, more exotic. Then there was the way she looked. She had long, wavy strawberry blonde hair. She wore colorful muumuus, big gold hoop earrings, and layers of wooden bracelets that clacked together when she wrote vocabulary words on the chalkboard. She had enormous breasts that filled her muumuu and entered the classroom minutes before she did. God, I was so gay for Ms. Harmon. This is probably why I ended up becoming a writer. I longed to lay my head gently upon her ample bosom, correctly spelling words like “eager” and “valiant” while she patted my head with approval. What hot teacher wouldn’t want to come home and get motorboated by her ten-year-old star student with amazing bangs?

  When I was in the fourth grade, I lived in Nebraska. Lovely Ms. Harmon taught English, and the dreaded Mrs. Payne taught science class. We learned quickly that you’d better not make a joke about Mrs. Payne’s name or you were going to the principal’s office. She was famous not only for her cranky disposition and her name, but also for the little spitballs she’d get on her lip when she read passages from our science books to us. They’d go up and down with her mouth and we’d all sit there staring at them and wondering why she didn’t wipe them off, and if that was going to happen to us when we were elderly forty-year-olds.

  She read us the chapter about the planets, about how Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest behind Jupiter, and how it has several rings that became visible when Galileo invented the first telescope in 1610. From far away the rings look like beautiful, solid hoops. But in fact, the rings are made out of dust, rocks, and ice that clump together and break apart as they revolve around the yellow planet.

  By the fourth grade, most of us had been in the same class for a few years. We sat through insects, food groups, and the solar system together. We could all predict what everyone would bring for lunch each day. We knew that while Mrs. Payne flung her spitballs up and down, Renee was going to ask too many questions, Jimmie was going to smell like pee (thankfully I’d grown out of pants peeing by this time), and Cassie was going to pick her scabs and eat them. Yawn. There was nothing new under our sun.

  Then one day after the Christmas break, Becky showed up in our class. Her family had moved to our district from some faraway place called Georgia. We only knew how far away it was because Mrs. Payne pulled down the giant map and pointed it out with her big wooden poker. Georgia was way over there and purple, and Nebraska was here and blue. Becky was dropped down into our midst wearing a pair of overalls and speaking with a southern drawl that was as exotic to us as caviar. We didn’t understand, and we were all instantly intrigued.

  While most new kids would be shy and quiet, Becky was a firecracker from the get-go. She entertained us with her stories of Georgia roaches “so big you could put a saddle on ’em.” She wondered why we didn’t have grits in the cafeteria. Um, because we don’t even know what grits are. When she said “Go Big Red,” “red” grew into a three-syllable word and there was a little kick at the end. She called her dad “Daddy” and her mom “Momma.” She always smelled like baked goods, and she could penny-drop like a god. We couldn’t stop looking at her or listening to her. We couldn’t stay away from her. Gravity drew us to this giant, charismatic shiny object who had magically appeared in our tiny Midwest lives of Pop Rocks and orange drink. Like the rings of Saturn, we little chunks of ice and dust and rock began to orbit around her.

  Our school days grew brighter. It was like someone finally changed a giant light bulb that’d been burned out for a long time. Fourth grade was suddenly more than braces and unfortunate haircuts. We all fell into mad crush with Becky, and it made us all insanely happy, as only irrational love can do. Everyone always knew where she was and what she was doing, and we all clambered like hungry little monkeys to be involved as much as possible. We hung around and hung on and became a collective love-struck herd that followed her wherever she went. Poor Becky. We must’ve been overwhelming, with our desperate desire to suck from her everything that was different from ourselves. But she endured us all with patience, generosity, and joy, which made us love her even more.

  Becky’s momma was a gospel singer who used to sing back up for Elvis. She even had her own record, and Becky gave us all a copy of it. It was called “I’m Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs.” We all took our copies home, and to the horror of our parents, played the shit out of that twangy little 45. It must be good music, right? It came from Becky. By March, we knew all the words and would sit on the playground singing, “When Jesus says to me well done, I’ll lay down my soul, my battles are won. I’ll walk dem golden stairs when I die,” in our finest God-fearing Georgia accents. The Nebraskan suburbs had never heard such a thing. Becky sat in the middle of it all, singing along, watching us bump into and climb over each other as we struggled to stay close to her, our yellow Saturn, our new reason for coming to school every day. Becky even began to overshadow my obsession with Ms. Harmon.

  And then, just as quickly as she appeared, she vanished. Her daddy was transferred back to Georgia and in an instant she was gone, leaving us alone in the Midwest with just some records and vague ideas about salvation to prove she was ever there. There was mass heartbreak and blank staring. Lots of whining. The giant light bulb was burned out once again. We were blasted out of our reverie, our orbit, our seemingly solid new collective purpose as Becky disciples and wannabe Georgians, only to revert back to what we used to be: just some old pieces of ice and rock, floating around without much purpose, sitting at our gray desks with our unfortunate haircuts, spelling vocabulary words, watching spitballs and eating scabs, listening for the comforting clack-clack of Ms. Harmon’s bracelets.

  kitchen window

  There are a lot of stories about shame in this book. But this story hurts worse than the others, and it all went down while I was standing with my mom in our mustard-yellow kitchen. She was cooking something, which, if she wasn’t working or doing laundry, was what she was always doing.

  School had just gotten out for the summer, and I walked into the kitchen with my seventh-grade yearbook in my hand. My mom asked how my day was. I said, “Great. Last day of school. We signed yearbooks today. I didn’t let Rena sign mine.”

  Rena and her family lived across the street from us. She was part Asian, which was a big deal in 1983 in suburban Phoenix. It was exotic, and not in a good way. Plus, her last name was K-o-c-h, which was pronounced “cock,” so basically, Rena was fucked. But I liked her. She was shy and nice, and sometimes at school we ran in the same circles. The quiet, try-not-to-draw-attention-to-yourself-and-be-killed circles. It’s hard to believe, I know, but I was not some incredibly popular seventh grader. I didn’t know how to dress, unlike the other girls in their Jordache jeans with their combs sticking out of their back pockets. Every time I tried to carry a comb in my back pocket it would catch the back of my chair when I got up and cause a fiasco. Fiascos don’t make you popular until college. Plus, I could never figure out how to use my curling iron correctly, so my hair always looked a little stupid, and my tennis shoes were brown, because they were the only ones that fit my giant
feet. An Asian girl named Cock? That was my people.

  My parents hated living across the street from a bunch of cocks, and were actually relieved when, years later, a Mexican family moved in.

  At Christmastime every year, Mr. Cock grabbed a bunch of colored lights out of the garage and threw them up in his olive tree in the front yard. Like he was setting doves free at a wedding. Except not that majestic. Mostly, it was a shit show, but he didn’t care. The lights clumped and dangled, and my father would stare at them through the kitchen window. You could almost smell the disdain bubbling from his eyes. My father was so obsessed with Christmas light perfection that he had drawn blueprints of how they should be put up every year. And when he did, they were so straight and white and perfect they looked like stars had been razor-cut out of the night sky to land on our eaves. And here he was, forced to gaze upon the half-assed nightmare happening across the street. Like Charlie Brown lived there instead of the Cocks.

  Rena’s father was fat and bald and walked around his front yard in a dirty white tank top, dangling a nasty chewed-up cigar from his mouth and screaming for his kids to pick their shit up, like he was worried about what his yard looked like. His wife was a pretty Asian lady, so my mother concluded that she was a mail-order bride. I imagined my mother would watch them get in the car to go somewhere together and probably think, They aren’t even real, while drinking another whiskey and yelling at my dad to take out the fucking garbage already. I could tell she was thinking that by the sour look she’d get on her face when she saw them.

  Naturally, I thought she’d be pleased when I lied and told her I wouldn’t let Rena sign my yearbook. Family solidarity, right? Fuck those Christmas lights. Fuck that front yard yelling. Fuck all those weeds. Fuck the Cocks! But instead, she turned away from her meatballs to look at me and said, “That’s mean. You should have let Rena sign it. She’s your neighbor.”