by phuc
She had a stroke a few years back. This was mostly because of me, she said. She said her stroke came the first time I failed. “It was God’s way of striking me down. Of waking me up and telling me that I had to stop sparing the rod.” I tried to tell her I had been failing since birth. This stroke that I or God or whoever gave her made her slur her words. She smoked constantly, her cigarette dangling out of her mouth. The cigarette coupled with the slur made it nearly impossible to understand a thing she said.
After my fist time failing, she also became a devoted follower of vodka and gin, which probably didn’t help the slurring either. She only drank the bottom-shelf stuff, the kind that comes in plastic bottles. Invariably, these bottles could be found below the kitchen sink and, wherever the mother was, a snifter was always at arm’s length. Her boozing usually knocked her out shortly after I got home, after her stories had gone off on the television.
She lived for those stories! Sometimes I think the people on the television had become more real to her than me and Racecar. I couldn’t really blame her, though. I was a dumb boring shit, fun to laugh at but never with. Nothing but trouble. Virtually retarded.
And the father, the father was something different altogether.
He was, as I said before, an angry gimp. He’d lost both of his legs in a work-related incident of dubious cause. I never talked to him much, anyway—especially about that. He had this old motorized wheelchair he zoomed around the house in and he was always knocking things over—ashtrays and glasses off the coffee table, the TV Guide off the mother’s end table. All the lower cabinets in the kitchen had this horizontal strip of raw wood down close to the floor from him slamming into them with the unused metal footrests on that damn gimpy wheelchair. That’s all he did with his day, zooming around the house like he was in some fucking marathon for cripples. The carpet, which wasn’t in too good of shape anyway, was all worn bare from his continuous buzzing. He was trying to wean himself off the motor, though. He saw the motor, undoubtedly a modern convenience to most, as some sign of weakness. A classic case of overcompensation, he wanted to make his arms and torso huge to make up for not having any legs. He didn’t talk much and when he did it was with his teeth clenched around this old yellowed-plastic cigarette filter. He had stopped smoking after he lost his legs. He said if he ever had to go on some sort of lung gadget, it would make the wheelchair too heavy to whir around the house like that. When he did talk it was usually a fervidly passionate and obsessive rant about getting the basement all cleared out so he would have a decent place to ride his chair around. I wasn’t even sure the basement needed “all cleared out.” Nobody had ever gone down there. It could have been used as a body farm for all we knew.
The mother described the father as a “bundle of nerves.”
“Why don’t you just stop for a minute,” she would strumble. “Stop turning this place into the goddamned Grand Prix.”
Even with the television turned to top volume, the mother still had to strain to hear her stories over the buzzing and clunking of the father. Sometimes he growled around that filter. This really drove the mother nuts. When he started with the growling she usually had to go into the bedroom and lie down. That’s something else she was doing more of lately, just going into the bedroom and falling asleep. If I was ever too sick to go to school, she usually stayed in bed all day. Like a whole day with me was just too much for her. Needless to say, she was bedridden most of the weekend. She would make me move the television stand over to her doorway so she could still watch it. She never let me push it all the way into the room. She said it cluttered up her room to push it all the way in. Since she made me her personal servant when I was there all day, bringing her this and that, I had to go through the tedious process of moving the television out of the doorway to get to her bed.
So that’s what the parents were like. That’s not really fair. That’s what the parents had become. I really hated them. I hadn’t always hated them but, lately, I hated them an awful lot. I didn’t really blame them for anything, like my failing and all that fuckness. Before I started failing, back when I actually tried to fit in, I blamed them for a lot because, even at an earlier age, I knew they had somehow created me. I never saw myself as something that came from God. I wasn’t familiar with the eggs and the sperm and all that fuckness but I could tell I was like two puzzles that had the pieces all mixed up, making a third puzzle that didn’t really look like anything. So when I was younger, I blamed them a lot because I didn’t have my own personality so I was just a combination of them and they sure were terrifically blobby wastes. But I grew out of that and I just started wondering why I had to be born to them. That’s really when I started hating them.
I knew I still wouldn’t have fit in, but at least I could have maybe had new clothes and good food and all that fuckness.
I was sure there were a lot of other people out there who would have made better parents. Maybe if I’d been born to one of those other countless parents I could have had some sort of plan or goal or fuckness like that. Mostly I just sat around wondering how I could have been born to such slothful and ridiculous blobs like the parents.
When Miss Pearlbottom sent me home that day, I knew I had it coming. Miss Pearlbottom liked to call the parents from school whenever she thought she didn’t have an opportunity to punish me enough for one day. Like I could tell that some days she wanted to haul off and smack me, I could see it in her eyes. Those were the days she would call home so that the mother and father could properly lay into me. I hated them all. The mother, the father, and Pearlbottom combined formed some kind of fuckness triumvirate. A web of fuckness. Those three lead the fuck-Wallace-Black-in-the-ass parade.
That day, walking home through the rain, I hated them—especially the parents—
with an even greater passion than usual. The only thing I could think about was getting the fuck out of Milltown and never looking at any of those blobby faces with their seeping rectum mouths ever again. I walked down the sidewalk and remembered that old saying, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” and I made sure to step on every fucking crack along my way. I briefly hoped the parents would be too tired to really punish me or maybe they would have a stroke of understanding or compassion but I guess, deep down, I knew that wouldn’t happen. They always had their ways.
Sometimes, when they didn’t jump my ass the second I walked through the door, they punished me in different ways. Like sometimes the mother wouldn’t make dinner because demons didn’t deserve dinner. That thing I said about wishing I hadn’t been born to them, well, I knew they had the same feelings. Like they wished that I had never been born to them. The mother really did think I was a demon. I would catch her saying pitiful little prayers over my bed when I was asleep, trying to get the demon to fly out.
Sometimes she would make me say prayers, too. They were stupid things I tried to forget right after saying them. They all sounded like something you’d find on a napkin or book of matches. I bet the father prayed he would’ve had a son like Bucky Swarth. A stout little shit who was smart enough to get away with everything he did. Making me skip dinner was actually one of the better punishments they had in store for me. That is, I didn’t really mind it too much. The best punishment was when they flat out gave me a beating and sent me to my room. That was the best punishment because it was over so quickly. Any beating was better than thinking you’re not going to get punished and then getting punished when you least expected it.
One time I got in trouble for some stupid fuckness or the other and they didn’t say anything when I walked into the house. This was one of the first alternative punishments I can think of. So this one time there was no yelling or hitting and I didn’t bring up anything that happened at school and a couple hours went by with me at home and nothing happening. I stood by the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of ice water, thinking everything was just fine, like I’d got away with something, when the father barreled out of the living room on that wheelchair a
nd rammed it straight into me. The hard steel hit me at the same level it usually did the cabinets and I thought that leg he hit, the left one, was broken. But I couldn’t say anything like, “What the fuck’re you doing?” because I knew that was part of my punishment. There was something inside of me that said I deserved the punishments. That it was just something I had to put up with. And the crazy fuck kept doing that for the rest of the night. I’d have my back turned and right when I heard that whirring and growling I’d try to move but it got me anyway. And it hurt like hell every time. You’d think I would have wised up after the second or third time, but that’s where my stupidity comes in. Was it stupidity or optimism? After every hit I told myself that had to be the last one. How could he think I could possibly take more than that?
There was this other time I got all the way to bed thinking I wasn’t going to get punished and woke up the next morning with an incredibly bad haircut. It was that morning more than any other that I awoke wishing I wasn’t such a sound sleeper. We lived right behind some train tracks and that loud sound kind of dulled me to noises and fuckall, I think. So, because I slept so fucking heavy, I woke up and had these wild tufts of hair sticking up all over my head. I looked like a crazed chemotherapy patient. I wasn’t attracting anyone anyway, but that fucking ridiculous haircut made it even worse. Like I could give up all hope of ever attracting anyone, or even going unnoticed which, at that point, was the best thing I could really do. It worked too, the punishment that is. The kids at school taunted me for the next month, making all kinds of stupid remarks and jokes and fuckness. Like, “Hey, Wally had a fight with a lawnmower and the lawnmower won.”
I must have heard that a hundred times by the end of the month and I wanted to smash all those blobby people’s teeth out. If you ever see someone who’s had a really bad haircut, you should never start all that shit about the lawnmower because they’ve probably heard the same thing three times that day. Some of them just called me “Leukemia Boy,” like leukemia’s a disease you get from jerking off or something. I’d never hated those blobs at that fucking school more than that month I had the really bad haircut. Did they think I didn’t know my hair was ridiculous?
I eventually found the clippers and evened it out myself. I got hit for that. The mother busted her drinking glass against my face and strumbled, “I didn’t tell you you could do that yet.” She acted like I was some kid who was put on the couch for quiet time and got up before my fifteen minutes were served. She was a really vacant mean sick piece of blobshit.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I never really knew how things were going to be when I walked in the door of my house. I braced myself that day I got thumped by Swarth. It felt like I had already been through so much. I didn’t really know how much more I’d be able to take.
I imagined that fatass Swarth going home to his family.
“Hello, son,” his mom would say. “How was school?”
“School was great, Mom!”
“Oh yeah, what’d you guys do?”
“Well, I beat the absolute shit out of this kid named Wally Black.”
“Hmmm… I don’t know if that’s so… Wait… Wally Black, he’s that half-wit molester, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s a real queer, too.”
“Well, that’s just won derful, Bucky. It’s nice to see you’re looking out for your fellow classmates like that. Looky what I bought you… A new pair of pants!”
I imagined things like that just to amuse myself. There were some days when I imagined things about everybody. It was like I lived this whole other world in my head, where the people I hated were truly despicable people. It depended on the person, I guess, and sometimes these things were quite mundane. That girl had a brother who was dying and she thought it was funny. That kid had sex with his mother. This other kid was a ravenous drug addict. This girl’s parents sold her into white slavery and on the weekends she had to have sex with people of exotic origins, slimy men with huge mustaches. That boy made love to a sheep. That kid had prosthetic legs. His dad was a Nazi. This kid’s gay. That one’s a Satanist. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise no one liked me.
I got onto our street, Walnut, and my body didn’t want to go any further. I wanted to be home as fast as possible if I had to be there at all, but my battered body forced me to walk kind of slowly. It was work just to focus on the sidewalk. I’d never felt so tired and sore in my life. I wanted to get the beating over with and go to my room. My room was the only place I felt even sort of comfortable in that house. Hell, it was the only place in the world I felt comfortable. That had to be my goal. That tiny room, as sad as it was, became my reason for going back to that house.
Our street wasn’t the absolute worst street to live on in Milltown but it was definitely a lower rung on the social ladder. There were three houses on the street that were just burnt out shells. The mother said that was from the crackheads. I believed her when she had first told me that but since I had stopped believing anything blobs ever said, I wasn’t so sure. The rest of the houses, like ours, looked like they were sinking into the ground or collapsing or some fuckness like that. Black soot had accumulated on all of the houses, quelling them into a monotonous gray color, the paint peeling away to reveal the weathered wood beneath. Some of the windows were boarded up. In other houses, odd things like shirts, quilts, and Confederate flags were used as blinds. Some people didn’t even have proper front doors. The whole road smelled like gasoline, oil, and sewage.
I reached our door and figured, what the hell, might as well get it over with. Had to get to my room, you know. And then I opened the door, hoping it wasn’t one of those nights where they decided to fuck around.
It wasn’t.
Chapter Five
The Horns
Fucking Racecar. He was waiting right there at the door for me. The combined smell of rotting wood and stale cigarette smoke greeted me as I stood there in front of the door, not having any idea of what was coming.
I opened the door, swinging it inside and to my left, thinking about how stiff I was from the Swarth beating. About the time I thought that thought, Racecar launched himself out of his wheelchair like a bizarre armed missile, barreling into me. The blow hurt like holy hell. I stayed upright, though, Racecar deflecting off me, thudding to the floor and rolling around. My first reaction was to tear his face off. I was so mad and sad anyway that it didn’t really matter. I could have done it. I could have killed Racecar right then and there. Not only could I have killed him, I wanted to. I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to snuff the life right out of the nightmare. But nothing wanted to move. I had those dreams sometimes where somebody was trying to fight me and when I went to fight back my punches were slow and leaden and if I tried to run away then it felt like I was trying to pull myself through water. This felt just like those dreams. By the time I had gained some sense of what was going on, Racecar wrapped a muscular hand around my ankle and yanked it out from under me. I went down hard.
“Fuck it,” I said, mumbling it through swollen jaws and a whumming head. It was almost like I was proving a point, lying there and taking Racecar’s blows like that.
Even though he had no legs to speak of, his arms were like tree trunks from pulling himself around in that wheelchair so much. Why couldn’t he just use the motor?
I hated that fucking wheelchair.
I was face down on the carpet and those heavy hands kept hitting the back of my head. One of them was wrapped around one of my arms. I couldn’t tell which arm it was.
I wasn’t sure which side of my body was which. I felt his huge eagle-shaped belt buckle digging into my back and I’m pretty sure he was trying to jab that plastic cigarette filter into one of my ears. Worst of all, I could picture him rubbing those hideous stumps all over me. I could feel them. The pain became a giant blur, like a huge red-black womb I tried to viciously tear myself out of. I could hear him grunting and growling, “You little shit. You little piece of shit. Fuckin l
owlife trash. Never even offered to help me clean the goddamn basement.”
Once it felt like I slid out of that womb, everything was kind of dark and foggy and numb. It made me think of being wrapped in cotton. The impact of the blows resonated through my body but the sharp, stinging pain was gone. The mother’s voice came down all around me like a big brassy bullhorn, amplified strumbling, a needle through the cotton.
“We’ve had it! We’ve had it! You’re gonna get it this time you little shit. You’ve ruined our lives. Do you hear me? Ruined them! We’re nothing because of you. You and your stupid failing and your shitty rotten brain. What are you?!” Seeing that I was a bit lost for words, she graciously strumbled the answer to her own question. "Demonshit!
Demonshit! That’s what you are! Jesus Christ, we’re gonna mess you up this time.
You’re getting the fucking demon horns you deserve and I hope you wear em til you die!”
Then I felt her wrestling with my head, pulling it up off the floor, sending snapping red shivers of pain shooting down my spine. I could smell that horrible smoke and liquor stink hanging around her in an acrid cloud. I found it in me to thrash.
The horns.
I’d seen the horns.
The Wig had threatened me with those horns before. Mostly she started using them as a way to keep me in my room at night. She told me that if I took a notion to wander, I’d wake up with those giant grotesque things on my head. I squirmed and bucked her off, managing to stand.
Racecar quickly yanked my legs out from under me, being expertly positioned to do so. I flew backward and bashed my head on the door, legs sprawled out in front of me.
The mother knelt on my legs, facing me, smothering me with her mannish girth. With each breath I took, consciousness slowly slipped away.
That was the first time I felt the red crawlies and I thought maybe the mother was right.