Everything Is Wrong with Me

by Jason Mulgrew

  A pair of brass knuckles was my next step up from the blackjack. I don’t know how I came across a pair—I’m sure it must have had something to do with someone’s older brother who got them from someone else but who was now selling them for money for beer/weed/pills. I used them, of all places, on my paper route, which was two blocks away from my street and one block away from my church. I guess I wanted to be prepared in case any thugs came out of the ten o’clock mass looking to start some shit.

  After reading what I’ve written so far, I need to interject here for a moment and clear something up. While I may sound like a little “street tough,” walking my paper route with my brass knuckles close by in case any shit went down, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I was a chubby twelve-year-old who had only kissed one girl and spent most of his disposal income on comic books and most of his time exploring the new and wonderful world of masturbation, slathering himself up with moisturizer and going to town. It was a charmed life, really. But perhaps that is why my friends and I were so into weapons. The lure of the weapon, the desire to possess the weapon, and the longing for others to know that you possessed the weapon was a universal truth in my youth. Guns and our other weapons represented a power that was otherwise out of our collective grasp as stupid kids.

  But we were just that. Stupid fucking kids.

  I had a kind of love/hate relationship with my buddies Phil and Vic. On the one hand, they were two of my closest friends. We did almost everything together, although admittedly “almost everything” consisted mostly of sitting around the Park, hanging out, and waiting for some friends to get in a fight over a pickup basketball game. Then there was that week when we were catching and blowing up mice with my leftover firecrackers. That was pretty cool.

  But they were unconscionable ballbusters. Phil was a great basketball player and never hesitated to tell you about it. Though he had a good sense of humor, he was a tough and competitive kid and could be abrasive, to put it mildly. As a twelve-year-old, Vic weighed almost two hundred pounds and had fists the size of Easter hams. He was considered a gentle giant with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock, but at the same time he seemed like he could go off at any moment. And god damn he was a big dude. Then there was me. I didn’t play any sports (didn’t play any sports well, at least), was chubby but not intimidating, and spent my time talking to the girls, desperately trying to make them laugh, and by extension, desperately trying to get them to let me touch them under their bras. The former I was good at; the latter, well, not so much.*

  Therefore, as the “weakest” member of the three of us, I was often the victim of Phil’s and Vic’s bullying tendencies. It seemed like every time it snowed, I was the one who got whitewashed (held down and packed with snow) first and most maliciously. We used to pillow-box, wrapping pillows around our fists in place of boxing gloves, but it seemed like the pillows slipped off Phil’s and Vic’s hands more when they were fighting me than when they were fighting others, leaving me bruised up and sometimes with a fat lip.

  [Note to reader: The following paragraph should be read in the style of Ray Liotta, reprising his role as narrator and protagonist Henry Hill in Goodfellas.]

  Yet I didn’t mind. I was still in the crew. There was me, Phil, Vic, Floody, Jimmy the Muppet, Eclipse, and Screech. Then there were guys like Ernie Bubble, Hutt, Brown Eye, Eddie C., Chad, Kruzer, Doc, Renzi, Robbie C, Patty K., Adam, Coast to Coast Steve Trusko, Big J., Beaver, Large, and the Wigs. We may have disagreed with each other and had the occasional fight, but we were a family.

  [Here ends the Ray Liotta/Henry Hill voice.]

  An occasional whitewash wasn’t a sign of disrespect and didn’t mean I wasn’t part of this extended family. We busted the balls of our friends; we picked on people outside our circle. Like Danny Kramer, whom we covered so thoroughly with ketchup and creamer from Burger King that he started crying. So we locked him in the bathroom of the local pool hall for an afternoon. And there was Shitty Brian, so named because he got the Shit Nose. On his way home from karate, a group of my friends grabbed him, held him down, and the nastiest of the bunch put their bare asses on his face, thus proving once and for all that karate is for pussies—he wasn’t karate chopping any blocks of wood when he had ass on his face. Snow in your ears was not a big deal. Shit on your face was. This was an important distinction.

  I dealt with Phil and Vic being dicks every once in a while because we were boys. I knew that I wasn’t being disrespected, it wasn’t something that was constant, and there was no real physical pain, so I didn’t think much of it. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing their abuse because I was (and still am) a total pussy. That could be true, but then there’s also this: fuck you.

  A big part of the friendship that Vic and I shared was our love for music. He had an older brother, and while the rest of us were listening to MC Hammer and Poison, Vic’s brother was feeding him a steady diet of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead. It was at Vic’s family’s house up the mountains* that I was first introduced to the other music of the Beatles. I had heard “Ticket to Ride” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” before while my mom cleaned the house. But when Vic gave me Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to listen to in my brand-new portable CD player, I, like about two hundred million other people before me, had an awakening. From then on, Vic became my musical mentor, turning me on to all sorts of different stuff that wasn’t made by any former members of New Edition.

  And Phil—well, girls liked Phil.

  That Phil went to tennis camp was an anomaly. Tennis was not a sport played in the neighborhood. The only acceptable sports were basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. They could be played in different incarnations (that is, flag football, Wiffle ball, etc.), but these were the four sports. There was a brief flirtation with soccer when the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, but we’re talking very brief—it ended when the volleyball we were using as a soccer ball was lost.

  Phil might have been on to something though, because what going to tennis camp meant was exposure to new girls. Frankly, we were all sick of the girls from the neighborhood.* The Second Street girls were divided into two groups, the Pretty Girls and the ASP. The Pretty Girls were, as the name implies, attractive. They were the first girls to start wearing makeup and high heels and bras and, I don’t know, whatever girls wear when they’re growing up and first learning how to manipulate their sexuality. The Pretty Girls were out of our league, preferring instead to date older guys (you know, like high school guys). Naturally, we resented them. ASP stood for “Ankle Sock Posse,” referring to the athletic short socks that the girls in this group wore to play basketball. The girls of the ASP preferred mesh shorts and ponytails to heels and makeup and had seemingly zero interest in exploring their sexuality.* But still, they were cool girls who could handle it when one of us walked over to them holding a piece of his scrotum in his hand from under his mesh shorts and asked, “Does anyone want a piece of Juicy Fruit? I chewed it up a bit, but it’s still good.” But romantically speaking, we lusted after the Pretty Girls, whom we couldn’t have; we hung out with the ASP, whom we didn’t want.**

  At tennis camp, Phil had a pipeline into new girls, who my friends and I automatically assumed were prettier than our girls and also more liable to put out. After the first summer when he returned from the camp, he regaled us with stories of the girls there, of discreet hand jobs (or at least knob rubs) in the woods and of campfire make-out sessions. But Phil being Phil, we didn’t know if this was true or if it was only his braggadocio talking. We treated his stories with the proper skepticism, asking for proof, which he not so surprisingly could not provide.

  After his second summer at tennis camp, Phil returned with more of the same stories, but this time he came back with something else—a telephone number. It belonged to a girl named Adriana (such an exotic name!) whom he had met and made out with at camp. He told us first that she was hot and had large boobies, but also that her da
d was a judge. (A judge! She must be rich! And rich girls put out! Probably!) The collective awe of the crowd was nearly audible.

  Vic and I were eager to tap into this new resource. The girls of the neighborhood knew us and wanted nothing to do with us, but this, this was opportunity knocking. Perhaps I could meet a nice rich girl, get a bunch of hand jobs, get married, and then buy a house with a nice big pool. That would be nice. So it was Vic and I who were chosen to accompany Phil on a group date to the movies with Adriana and her girlfriends.* Chosen might not be the right word, since from the moment he brought up the possibility of a group date, Vic and I badgered him about going. The plan was that Phil, Vic, and I would meet Adriana and her friends at the movies. Phil would pair off with Adriana while Vic and I would be left to go after her friends. After the movie, we’d all go get a slice of pizza. If it all worked out, we’d make out in the parking lot of the pizza place, which would be the most sexually advanced thing I’d ever done to that point by tenfold.

  Prior to the date, Vic got ready by listening to Steely Dan. He shaved, which was a privilege and obvious sign of manliness among twelve-year-olds. When he was finished, he got dressed, sat in the leather recliner he and his brother had in their cramped room, and secretly smoked a cigarette out his window.

  I did not shave before the date, because I did not have any hair to shave.* I did, however, obsessively brush my teeth, so concerned was I with kissing a girl while having bad breath. When I finished, I sat down on my bed and listened to John Lennon sing “Cry Baby Cry” to help me calm down. This was going to be a good night. I hoped.

  Phil, much more accustomed to these types of things than either Vic or I, threw on a splash of cologne (likely Drakkar) when he stepped out of the shower. He put on his nice new Structure shirt, tousled his hair, checked himself in the mirror, and, as a final touch, put his gun in his pants. He was ready to go out.

  A few weeks before, Phil had bought a gun. A fake gun, that is. We were too old for cap guns but not nearly old enough for the real thing, so this particular gun was somewhere in the middle. It was a replica gun, like an inoperative model of a gun. It shot neither caps nor bullets—it shot nothing, actually. He bought it because it looked alarmingly like a real gun. Phil had taken to carrying around his “piece,” as he called it, everywhere. I couldn’t blame him; it was a pretty fucking cool gun, a chrome .38 revolver, nice and new and shiny. But what was different about this gun from other fake guns was not only how real it looked, but how real it felt. Phil’s gun had some real weight to it, and unless you knew it was a fake, you would never guess it was.

  As Phil, Vic, and I walked to the movie theater to the meet the girls, Phil lifted his shirt, showing us the gun in his waistband. Vic and I rolled our eyes, thinking this was Phil trying to be his usual “badass” self, and didn’t think anything else about it. There were more important things to worry about tonight.

  At the movies we met Adriana, Phil’s interest, and, for me and Vic to divide and conquer, Christine and Faith. It was plain to see early on in the evening that neither Vic nor I would be sharing a glorious make-out session with either girl. Just as we had begged/forced Phil to bring us along, it seems that Adriana had begged/forced Christine and Faith to come along with her. Actually, I don’t think any of the four of them—Phil, Adriana, Christine, and Faith—spoke to either Vic or me all night. Adriana deferred to Phil, adoringly almost, as he aced the audition before Christine and Faith. Vic and I talked to each other, but rarely. At best we came off as strong silent types; at worst we looked like Phil’s bodyguards/semiretarded friends.

  After the movie, during which Phil and Adriana made out with each other the entire time flanked by Vic and me on one side and Christine and Faith on the other, we stuck to the original plan and went to get pizza. The pizza place was only a block away, a store in a small strip mall that also contained a Wawa,* a check-cashing place, a video store, and an empty store. There was a large parking lot in front of these stores and opposite the stores on the other side of the parking lot were two busy gas stations. This area was just underneath an exit off Interstate 95, the main north-south artery on the east coast of the United States, and which runs right through Philadelphia.

  Vic and I watched Phil and the girls carry on at the pizza place. We laughed when it seemed appropriate to laugh but mostly kept to ourselves. I was bummed out by the whole situation but had long before given up on the night. I had had high hopes heading into it, but the coldness of Christine and Faith brought them crashing to the ground. I did not consider myself the next Warren Beatty, but a little nonaccidental eye contact would have been nice. So as I still do when I face rejection from women, I shut down. Fuck it, I thought, if they don’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk them. They’re probably lesbians anyway. Yeah, lesbos. Eff them.

  After we finished the pizza, the guys, chivalrous as we were, got up to pay for the slices and sodas. Vic and I, as we were sitting on the outside seats, got up first, but Phil told us to sit down. “Guys, I got it,” he said as he lifted up his shirt to show the girls his gun.

  Seeing the girls squirm with fright, Phil quickly added, “Nah—I’m just kidding! It’s fake!” He pulled the gun out of his pants and plopped it on the table for them to see. Adriana and Christine were fascinated by the gun and how real it looked, asking various questions that Phil answered coolly and mysteriously (“Where did you get it?” “I got it from a buddy.” “How much was it?” “Don’t worry about it, but not cheap.”). Vic and I rolled our eyes and wished that we were more athletic, or at least good at tennis. Faith was very uncomfortable with the gun. Even though she was told it was a harmless fake, it looked too authentic for her tastes. The whole time the gun was on the table, which was only about a minute, she never took her eyes off it and never altered her cringing posture. Phil noticed this. After we had paid and we were out in the parking lot, Phil pulled out the gun and began jokingly threatening Faith with it, screaming “I want you, Faith!” and chasing her around the parking lot with the gun drawn as she squealed and ran away. The rest of us laughed, or pretended to. Phil stopped chasing Faith and the group reassembled for good-byes, as Christine’s mom would soon be arriving to drive the girls back to their neighborhood. Much to Phil’s and Adriana’s chagrin, Christine’s mom arrived early and there was no time for any good-night making out. Much to the rest of our delight, there was no need for an awkward good-bye.

  Phil, Vic, and I began walking home along Water Street, next to the I-95 underpass, which we referred to as “under the bridge.” This stretch was sketchy; many of the older kids hung out under the bridge to drink and do drugs and hook up, as we would in a few years. A lot of homeless people and a number of unsavory characters hung around there as well. But we stuck to the Water Street side, which was lined with abandoned factories, giant castles of concrete now boarded up, standing five or six stories high, eyesores that were once responsible for jobs for our grandparents’ generation but now housed nothing but ghosts and dust. The black waters of the Delaware River trudged quietly along less than an eighth of a mile to our east; our homes and families were less than a quarter mile to our west.

  We were not afraid, since this was a walk we each had done, later at night and without the benefit of friends, hundreds of times before. Besides, it was the quickest way to get home. We talked as we walked, an occasional car passing us, Phil swearing up and down that he had, in fact, had his hands up Adriana’s shirt as they made out. While both Vic and I doubted this claim and said as much, I was too embarrassed to offer that I knew for certain that this was not true, because I watched Phil and Adriana make out for most of the night, hoping to collect any visuals that might possibly be useful for a masturbatory session later. A few blocks ahead of us, we saw a police paddy wagon turn onto Water Street, speeding along with its lights off, heading in our direction down the one-way street. “They were perfect,” Phil said, “like this much,” opening his hand wide to show the size of Adriana’s boobs. The
paddy wagon continued racing down the street, coming closer to us. “Swear to God—I swear on my mother. Jay, Vic, I swear on my mom I touched her tits.” The paddy wagon was fifty feet away, and closing fast, speeding toward our direction.

  Then the paddy wagon screeched to a halt just behind us. We turned to see that a cop had jumped out of the passenger door and drawn down on us, his pistol aimed squarely in our direction. His partner had run around from the driver’s side and positioned himself through the open passenger window, standing behind the door and using it as a shield, gun also drawn and pointed at us. Two white guys, both in their mid-twenties, they were screaming, “Up against the fucking wall! Up against the fucking wall right now!” Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself voluntarily up against the fucking wall, standing against one of the abandoned factories, eyes closed, legs spread, arms planted firmly on the wall, just like I had seen in the movies, saying rapid-fire Our Fathers. To my right was Vic, in a similar posture, though I thought I could hear Hail Marys coming from him. To our left was Phil, standing, not facing the building but rather the cops. And he was talking. I did not see him reach into the waistband to pull out his fake gun, I only saw it in his hand. The cops’ commands had changed to “Put the fucking gun down! Put the fucking gun down! Put the fucking gun down!” as Phil stood there, the gun lamely in his right hand, shining in the streetlight, as he gesticulated and pleaded, “It’s fake! It’s fake!” The cops were unmoved and continued to yell at it him to put the fucking gun down, to slowly put it on the ground, to put it down and get up against the wall, to put it down now. Phil acquiesced, slowly bent at his knees, put his fake gun on the ground, and positioned himself on the wall next to me and Vic. The cops moved to the gun and split up: one came over to Phil and put one hand on the back of his neck and ordered his hands behind his back, while the other picked the gun off the ground.