by David Amsden
But there was this one time when I wasn’t the boss with Mike, and, because I’m into trying to be honest with you, I think it should be pointed out here. We were playing in the woods this one time, and came up on a rattlesnake. Being around twelve, the only thing that made sense was to start peeing on the thing. You know, just to see what would happen. So there we are, pissing on this rattlesnake, and I look over and see Mike’s got hair, thin and brown and all burnt looking, where I still had none. And I was older. Not that he knew I was freaking out, not that he knew he could have had the upper hand. I’ve always been pretty good like that, and, anyway, Mike ended up slipping on some rock, falling, and pissing all over his chin. If you can even picture that.
Finally, Mike’s still crying all hysterically, but some words are getting out now.
It comes in these snotty, erratic sentences that take a while to make sense. He was saying something about his dad, about Ray, who was out of the house right now, giving the Bronco an oil change. He starts really making sense, these hot fragments finding orbit, Mike saying—
“He…he, he’ll be chasing me around the house, yelling. He’ll be yelling I’ll…I’ll fucking kill you. I’m gonna…get you.”
“Mike—” Dad said.
“He’s like…you can’t hide from me,” Mike went on. “One time I…I…I ran all through the house. And had…I had to hide behind Mommy….”
It was funny hearing the word mommy, sort of pathetic, but I didn’t think this was the time to bring it up.
“I was behind her, and he, Dad, was trying to get me,” Mike was saying. “Mom was like, get away, get away, I hate you so much. But, but…he…he’s always trying to hit me. He, he…God I hate him so much.”
The only woman who would ever be impressed by a house like Ray’s was one begging to be impressed by something, anything, please. Fortunately for Ray, and for Dad, these women were everywhere back then. They’d come out of some marriage and straight into our house, like it was the law. I remember Anne, who had such monstrous golden curls that it was impossible to tell the actual length of her hair. It was also, because of the lost, lighthearted way she moved around, impossible to determine who had met her first, Dad or Ray. And there was Peg, who couldn’t go to the bathroom without ever crying, and Melinda and Jane and Beth, this lady who was always using one of those lame paper pinch puppets—cootie catchers, she called them—to tell me and Mike our futures. Now lift up that flap right there, and look: you’ll be married with four kids! These women never lived with us very long, only a week or so. But that didn’t stop Mike, the resident expert at messing up, from slipping up a few times and calling a couple of them mom.
But hearing him now, it didn’t seem like such a big mistake—
Oh you should have seen these tears! His face was all shredded up, like it wasn’t tears he was crying, but sand, pulverized glass. And the things Mike started to say. He was talking about his sister now, Stacey, and how there was this one time, or maybe lots of times, where Ray had her pinned down on the kitchen floor, which was these big linoleum tiles covered in yellow daisies. He held both her wrists in one of his hands, his knees pressing down on the tops of her thighs. She was in a T-shirt, and underwear, and those floppy teenage-girl socks. Mike was telling me and Dad how Ray was calling her a fucking bitch, a slut. He was slapping her too, right across the face, using both sides of his hand. Stacey was fifteen, and suddenly it made so much sense to me why she was hardly ever around, why the only time you’d ever see her she’d be getting into some twenty-year-old guy’s car, like come on, let’s get out of here…Now!
It keeps on, for fifteen minutes at least—
“At night, he, he…I hate him, I really hate him. His face gets so red. He’ll be screaming, he screams, and…and…and I’ll have bruises.”
“Hey there, Mike—”
“He…he…he’s been doing it for like…forever.”
Mike said his friends would sometimes ask about the bruises. Like what’s that? How’d you get that? Mike said this happened lots of times, and that he never knew what to say. It struck me that I should have noticed these bruises, all the times we were together, but somehow I never did. Me and Dad just looked at him, waiting for him to stop because then we could figure out if any of this was really happening or not. We just had no idea what to do, me and Dad. Because I was young, and because for Dad it was family, and he had no clue about family.
The last year Ray lived there, some construction company bought the field in the back of the house, to turn it into one of these crammed developments. You know, the kind that in the nineties seemed to fill every last piece of open grass in this country. You may be living in one right now, for all I know. They were these huge houses, brick facades but aluminum sides, mansions I guess, but pressed so close together you could tell there was something wrong. They may as well have been tenements. I mean, you could easily tie laundry lines up between them. I think some people even did.
But that’s not the point. The point is that me and Mike had to start playing in the construction sites. It was the only thing that made sense. We’d play war games in the foundations, play king of the hill on the bulldozers, tour the homes when they were nothing but sandbags and wood frames and pink insulation. And all I’m saying is that the one time I decided to stay inside was the day the cops knocked on our door and informed Ray that they’d found Mike creeping around back there. That’s trespassing, the cops said, which was against the law. Ray apologized very professionally. He told the cops that he’d take care of it, if they didn’t mind. He said that he knew his son, said he knew him well.
Ray said he knew just what to do—
“Hey Brenda, something up?” I heard Brandon saying to his sister on television. Mike was still talking, but I was having trouble listening.
“I’m just worried,” Brenda said, “about Dylan. He’s been drinking again.”
“How about I take you for a milkshake?” Brandon suggested. “At the Peach Pit.”
“I hate him so much,” Mike was now saying. His words were still all minced and burning, but finding order. He took a breath. “I really hate him so much. I’m not even joking,” he said.
“The Peach Pit sounds perfect,” Brenda said.
“Mike?”
“I want to kill him,” he said. “I wish he was dead.”
Mom’s all like, my God, oh my God, I can’t believe it.
“I know,” I was saying. “I know.”
“That’s really Mike?” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
This was just this year, just a few months ago, me twenty years old now. I was home for Christmas, or Hanukkah—it’s never mattered to us. Grammy, my grandmother on Dad’s side, sent me this card. I haven’t seen her in years, so it was good to know she’s still alive. Anyway, there’s a photo inside, a picture of Mike, first I’d seen of him in years. Me and Mom, staring at it, we couldn’t get over it.
“I mean, I knew he got messed up,” Mom was saying, “but this is just—”
“Yeah,” is all I could say. “Yeah…”
You should have seen it. There’s Mike, tall and strong—actually beautiful. His head’s shaved, his skin tan. He’s graduating from the military, of all places, shaking some general’s hand. I didn’t bother mentioning that when I looked at this photo I remembered one time, a while ago, when Dad asked about dinner and that kid went off about how his father was always trying to kill him. It didn’t matter now, because it wasn’t even Mike anymore. Me and Mom just stood there, looking at this picture, at this stranger in it, and right there I should have said something to Mom, but I didn’t. I just should have told her thanks. Thank you so much, because I’d be that kid if you were a million different women.
CUT UP, NO BLOOD
ONE
Snow slanting down in sheets, really freezing out, the kind of Northeastern cold that turns your face to solid ice, then takes out a chisel and starts picking away. And the walk over to her house, to Claudia’s, it
takes forever. You go right out of my house, down Nelson Street, left on College Parkway—which isn’t really a parkway of any sort, just a two-lane street bordered by townhouses and tract houses all done up in these earthy shades of tan, beige, bleached yellow. You take this all the way past College Gardens Elementary, until it ends at College Plaza. Now cut through the parking lot, past the Shoppers Food Warehouse, the Kwick Stop, the Trak Auto, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and every other place popular with people who never even think about college. So now you’re on Route 355, Rockville Pike, a six-lane trench protected by the type of wide variety of stripmall architecture essential for a lifetime of loitering. But this part of the Pike you’re on now, it’s a little north of all that. This is the Jiffy Lube section, the used-car parking-lot stretch, the neon print in the windshield portion. The signs are in Spanish and English. It’s the part leading up to the Gude Drive overpass, and that mean’s you’re halfway to Claudia’s and should therefore quit caring about the fact that you’re so cold you can’t even blink right.
That’s where I was right now, the Gude Drive overpass, a four-lane concrete slab bent over the Metro tracks, the Red Line, straight to the senators of D.C. in thirty minutes, to the crack houses in thirty-five. There’s a thick concrete median, tall chain-link fences on either side, curving in at their tops like uncut fingernails. You know, like making sure no one ever jumps. The road was covered in dirty snow, slushed-out tire tracks crisscrossing as if two hideous skiers had just shot past. I hated it here, up on the overpass, because for some reason having to do with physics I’ll never comprehend, it was always freezing. Like up here, it gets cold even in hot weather.
After the overpass you go by Montgomery Donuts, which is connected to some sort of auto shop, the outside smelling like burned rubber and recycled WD-40, and where the blueberry-crunch donuts are about ten times superior to the ones at Dunkin’s. Now it’s left on some road you never knew the name of, a new road—laid down just yesterday, you swear. And then take a right into the Holly-broke development, which went up in twenty minutes a year ago, filled up with assimilating immigrants in forty-five seconds. This means you’re now officially out of Rockville, into Derwood, and so close to her house that you’re already tasting that watermelon Bubble Yum on her tongue.
It was that taste, all sandy-sweet, that was wrapped around my mind as I pushed the doorbell, pressed my face against the brushed glass window. And there’s Claudia, just look at her: here she comes, just a dim blur behind the glass, coming up to the door. She opened it, and I saw her mother standing right there over her shoulder. This meant I could not start kissing Claudia immediately and would have to come up with something cunning to say, something really genius, which ended up being—
“Oh my God, it’s so cold out there.”
Not that I wasn’t wearing enough layers. I was taking off my jackets now, piling them up in front of the door, first a little nothing windbreaker, now one of those Columbia parkas, the kind everyone had to have, even though the detachable fleece liners only came in gay blinding blue or even gayer blinding pink. Over that I was sporting a hooded Pittsburgh Pirates Starter jacket, total wigger style, that belonged to an old best friend at the time, this good kid Jamie who I fell out of touch with that September, right when high school happened. You know, because it’s practically mandatory that you lose all your friends when high school starts. I haven’t talked to him in years. Last I heard he was in Austin, busing tables at T.G.I. Friday’s, subsisting on thirty joints a day. It’s pretty funny, how Rockville’s this decent town, but every kid I knew who grew up there is living some life like this. I still have Jamie’s jacket, though, stuffed in the back of some closet, which is all I really wanted to mention. You’ll see why in a minute.
Sixth and seventh grade I was petrified of girls. They’d talk to me sometimes, say these confusing things like Hi, or Hey, hand me intricately folded notes asking How r u? Or Wuz up, down, all around? Like the better they got at English the smarter they got at messing it up. In the sixth grade these paralyzing moments came during the fifteen-minute break we got after lunch, where we were supposed to be thinking about the soldiers in Desert Storm, but really just walked around the Julius West Middle School parking lot staring at our feet.
In the seventh grade it was in the hallways at the end of the day, or outside as the buses pulled up. Every time I’d just stand there, look at them like a dumb-ass, these girls in clip-on earrings, their training bras bunched up under T-shirts, lips all smeared with the first touches of lipstick, stonewashed jeans severely cuffed at the bottom. I remember Carla, the girl from Uruguay or Paraguay, one of those, always chewing an eraser, spandex booty shorts riding up her ass like they were trying to exit out her mouth. Or Nanja, the black girl, first one in the grade with breasts, that Heavy D T-shirt stretched so tight the rapper looked twice as fat as he already was. Or Julie, white and Jewish, her bangs coated in so much hairspray they looked like a Slinky. But I’d just look at them, these girls, wait for them to go away, disappear, because that’s when I’d get my voice back, be able to say something.
But when the eighth grade came around something happened. I hit thirteen, certain chemical reactions occurred, adding a few inches, giving me a voice no longer higher than the girls’, pulling my face into the kind of shape I didn’t mind looking at in the mirror anymore. Nirvana was the band to listen to then, in 1993, so I was dressing like a Gap version of Kurt Cobain: the unbuttoned flannel, baggy construction-worker jeans, the kind with the little loop no one ever knew was really for a hammer, black Doc Marten boots scrubbed with sandpaper to look ten years old instead of brand new. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging, but somehow with all this came an ability to talk to girls, which is how I got to know Claudia, and which is probably the reason I don’t know why that Gude Drive overpass is so damn windy all the time. Because once I started talking to them, I quit paying attention to school for a long time.
Claudia was putting in a CD right now. It was the Spin Doctors. God, I hated the Spin Doctors, right up there with 4 Non Blondes, Cracker, and Soul Asylum—Claudia’s other favorite bands. Not that I was about to say anything. I’ve always been into keeping small secrets like that from women, the kind that the older you get start to come off a whole lot like flat-out lies. I don’t know. Women always seem to get so angry when you tell the truth, or maybe it’s that I haven’t figured out what telling the truth means. But whatever: None of it makes me proud. I’m trying to stop.
Like all the homes that everyone I knew lived in, Claudia’s had two living rooms, one that was always a demolition zone, Sega Genesis controllers knotted up in front of the television, Costco-sized Pepperidge Farm cookie boxes everywhere, about fifty remotes stuck to the coffee table because of a glass of Hawaiian Punch that spilled four years ago. This was where everyone was half the time, Claudia’s two little brothers pulling out each other’s hair, her younger sister pulling the fat on her waist and frowning, her mother glued to some soap opera or talk show, like it could actually tell her something important about the world.
Then there was the other living room that no one ever went in. That’s where me and Claudia were right now, where we always were. It sort of looked like a furniture store display, all done up in a creamy off-white: stiff off-white couches, a matching carpet, off-white ceramic knickknacks in an off-white glassed-panel knickknack cabinet. Even the stereo was off-white. Since her family had moved from Peru a few years ago, this all had that especially trying quality of an immigrant family trying to figure out what American means.
“Would he like some chocolate hot?” her mother was now yelling from the kitchen, just around the corner.
“You mean hot chocolate,” Claudia said. She was always teaching her mom how to speak English right, even though her accent was pretty thick too.
“Would he like some?”
“Mom, I bet he can hear you fine, considering he’s right here next to me. Why don’t you come in and ask him?”
/> Now her mom said something in Spanish, and Claudia looked at me and smiled, then said something back in Spanish. I’m no linguist, but I figured out quick that her mother would be coming around the corner in due time with two mugs of hot chocolate.
“Your mom’s funny,” I said. I was always noticing people’s moms back then, never their dads. I guess the more I lived only with Mom, the more I didn’t think of dads as really mattering. Claudia had a dad though, this guy who was around and always hated me for liking his daughter. But this didn’t matter. Like I said, I never noticed people’s dads.
“She’s so annoying,” Claudia was saying.
Claudia was wearing the standard uniform of freshman girls’ milling around the house: radioactive-orange Umbros, the seams atrophied, a long-sleeved T-shirt with something on it having to do with some beach no one’s ever really been to. Her hair, straight black down to her shoulders, was pulled back in a purple scrunchie, floppy cotton socks on her feet. The best part were the Umbros, because whenever she shifted into some position that pulled them tight around her hips you’d get a veiled glimpse at her underwear.
This is what was happening right now, as she’s on her knees leaning into the stereo to put in the goddamn Spin Doctors. They looked white, and cotton, cut high on the sides. I reached out, put my hand on the back of her thigh, slid it up to just under the taut line of the shorts.
Claudia moves back, knocks my hand away, saying—
“My mom is right in there.”
—in this whisper, with this grin riding her thin brown lips that did nothing but reinforce the foundation of my erection, which was already stronger than kryptonite. So when, as if on cue, her mother turns the corner, I had to shift quick into a less conspicuous position.