Then I lied. I suddenly realized what it was I might have. A bartering tool.
Everybody loves a lollipop.
“Aw, I kiss girls all the time. I’m sixteen. That’s almost an adult. Kissing’s what adults do.”
“Yer a big fat liar is what you are, Wally Black. I know you want to kiss me. Everybody does.”
It was true that I wanted to kiss her. I figured that would make me more like at least twenty-five other kids in the middle school. Hell, even the high school. Mary Lou was one of the girls that would hang out outside the middle school until the loser high schoolers drove by in their battered cars. Only, I guess I was a bigger loser than they were. At least they were in high school. But I felt like I needed more than a kiss from Mary Lou. I wanted to up the ante at least a notch.
“Can I use my tongue?” I figured that might be worth it and it seemed like something she would plausibly go for. I knew she wouldn’t suck me or let me finger her like I’d heard she’d done with Johnny Listo.
“Only for a second? For the sucker?”
I nodded. I was starting to choke up. It felt like somebody had poured cement on the inside of my body and it was rapidly hardening. The only thing that wasn’t hardening was Mr. Lawrence. Maybe if we hadn’t been on the playground. I had ogled Mary Lou all year. I had never even touched a girl and, with the prospect of sticking my tongue in that mouth, I felt weak all over. I think hearing about Mary Lou’s exploits made me even more excited. Like I thought that anything she could do would be really good.
“You ain’t got AIDS or nothin, do ya? You look like somebody who’s got AIDS.”
“I don’t have AIDS. I promise.”
I guess that was good enough for her. She took a step toward me and closed her eyes. She was a lot shorter than me so I had to bend way down. I shook uncontrollably. As soon as I was close enough to smell her skin under her perfume I kind of lost it, I guess. Once our lips touched, it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I tried to put my tongue in her mouth. I really wasn’t sure how it should be done. I mean, I’d seen people do it on the television but you never really got to see how the tongue got there. I just stuck it out like an insult. I wanted to slip it halfway down her blobby throat. At that point, I thought sex must be more about destroying each other. Just touching her made me want to like step inside of her body. To somehow stretch it to the point of bursting.
But she kept her teeth clenched. That felt like an embarrassing eternity, standing there as my tongue moved wetly against the plaque on her teeth. So I got this other idea. Real quickly, I put my clammy palm against her tan stomach and ran my hand straight down until it was in her pants.
For the slightest fraction of a second, I realized what this was all about. Mr. Lawrence picked up, stiffening against my briefs. I realized I didn’t give a fuck about Mary Lou. It was the senses I felt. Everything in that one breath. I tasted the inside of her mouth, smelled the oil on her skin, felt the thin cloth of her underwear on the back of my hand and that moist warmth on my palm. I wanted to do a lot more. I wanted to rip her pants off. I didn’t care where the hell we were. She pulled away, jumping back, and I could tell by the way she was looking at me she was really mad.
Hell, I would’ve been mad too. How many times had Mary Lou felt that predatory stiffening? How many times had her essence completely ceased to exist leaving her to become nothing more than a body? How many more times would she feel it? And how did she feel being able to use that as her only tool, her only asset? Had she went down on Johnny Listo willingly or had his stiffness become so completely overpowering she didn’t have a choice?
She reached out and snatched the sucker out of my hand. I was too nervous and shaky and full-feeling to tell her that a deal was a deal and she didn’t let me use my tongue. If she’d just let me use my tongue then maybe it would’ve stopped there and I wouldn’t be standing on the playground feeling so guilty.
She started yelling at me, bouncing that sucker toward me in the air, the way Pearlbottom sometimes did with the yardstick.
“You are a molester, Wally Black. Yer almost an adult, you said so yourself, and my momma says that older men ain’t supposed to be touching me. Especially there. Yer not just a molester, yer a big fat rapist. I never asked you to touch me, you stupid freak. I could have you locked up for this, just like Mom did Stephen. And I asked him to touch me.”
I got even more nervous and scared when she said that, but my guilt virtually vanished. “You got the sucker.”
“Damn right I got the sucker. That’s why I ain’t gonna tell Miss Pearlbottom bout this but choo better watch out cause I’m tellin Bucky all about it.”
That made me even more nervous and scared. My Swarth-free year was about ready to come to an end. Before trotting over to Swarth, Mary Lou leaned toward me and said, “If you’da played yer cards right, Wally Black, I woulda showed you my tits for this here sucker.”
Now, whether the sucker was watermelon or lime or sour apple, I would never know. The only thing I’d got out of the deal was a cheap feel of a crotch that I’m certain was diseased, if only by a low-grade form of crabs. And, even worse, it was a feel I’d felt guilty about.
Chapter Three
The Year of Swarth
Mary Lou stalked up to Bucky Swarth. I stayed over by the fence, bracing myself. I could have run but the playground was very small, so there really wasn’t any place to go, and I probably would have fallen down anyway. I had never really run away from the bullies. At first, I’d tried to fight back. Then I learned to just accept the beatings. Usually, if a teacher happened to come along while I was taking a good beating and not even fighting back, the bully would get in worse trouble than I would.
Bucky stood in the middle of the playground, his gang of five surrounding him. They stood there like they belonged, puffing away at their cigarettes. Some of them hadn’t grown to their full height yet, but I was certain that they all weighed over 200 pounds. Bucky was the biggest, naturally—the leader. It looked like he wore a new pair of pants every day, they were so stiff and blue-looking. He always had the bottoms of them cuffed-up and I knew he probably shopped in the husky section, his mother telling him that he was just big for his age. But he was a fatass. Weren’t fat people supposed to be made fun of? The bottom of his stomach stuck out of his striped shirt. I could tell he already shaved. Wiry, black hair covered his vast white stomach. He wore a big black leather jacket with lots of shiny silver buckles on it. The arms were too short and I questioned the physics required to zip it over his gut. He kept his black hair in a very retro crew cut.
I stood there, quivering with fear, watching Mary Lou talk to him, rubbing those breasts all over his arm. She was rather coy about it, throwing her arms into some sort of gesticulation, moving in to ever so slightly swipe Swarth with her chest. For treatment like that, I would have beat the hell out of me if I were Bucky Swarth. He tried to push her away, but she just kept rubbing herself all over him. I’m sure his leather-clad arm was numb to those stabbing, excited nipples. Boy, she was really mad. I heard her caterwauling from over where I was.
Apparently, she finally said something to catch his attention and shove his bloodlust into action. I was guessing she probably promised him anal sex without a condom or some fuckness like that. He leaned over to her and kissed her for a few seconds, massaging one of her breasts with a meaty hand. They broke up and he kind of pointed at me, mumbling something. Confirming her accusations, I guess. And then he was on his way over, throwing down his cigarette and aiming that big blobby head right at me. His gang followed him, their chests all pumped up. They all looked like they had tits and if they weren’t capable of inflicting such physical harm, I would have found the situation too absurd to take seriously. I imagined Pearlbottom sending a note home stating that I’d been whapped to death by bosoms.
There I was, standing frozen by the fence, shaking even more violently by that point. Bucky came over and just stood there, staring at me. Hate boiled in those ey
es, but it was real unspecific hate. Like he looked at everyone like that and I was no one special. That look was what made me most afraid. It was a zombiefied look that said there must be some form of altercation, some end, and there wasn’t going to be a shred of mercy in that conclusion.
“You wanna start some shit?” he said and spit onto the ground.
I was going to tell him about the deal and how the fucking blob bag had copped out on everything and then figured, why bother? Fuck it.
“No,” I said instead.
“My girl over there says you raped her good.”
“That’s not true.”
I knew there was no way I could talk myself out of it. I had trouble talking anyway and, being nervous and all, I could just forget it. My throat felt constricted. If I started talking, I’d just end up twittering like a girl hopped up on diet pills.
“You callin er a liar?”
“No.”
“Then you must be callin me a liar. You think I’m a liar, you fuckin molester piece of trash shit?” Whenever he said “liar” it sounded more like “lar.”
I knew the beating was coming and I could tell it was going to be real good and humiliating so I did something I didn’t expect. I spit in the fat blobfuck’s face. I did. I hawked a real thick one that felt like it sucked everything out of my brain and I aimed right in the middle of his sizable head, rolling my tongue around the mucous like a fleshy gun barrel. The glob hit him with surprising accuracy and hung there on the end of his puggy, piggish nose.
His gang collectively winced, “Oooh.”
Bucky tried to wipe the glob off real cool, but it hung there on the end of his fingers. He tried to flick it off with his thumb but the goober steadfastly latched onto that. He wildly flapped his arm but it just swung up and stuck onto the back of his hand. He bent down and wiped it on the damp grass, exposing an expansive backside the color of Swiss cheese. I was certain that he had a forest of ass hair.
“You’re dead.”
He stood up and shoved me back into the rusty fence.
I sprang forward and took a wild swing, completely missing him and throwing me off balance. One of his gang members stuck out his foot and tripped me up while Bucky pushed me forward onto the wet grass. I hit the ground and went skidding a couple of feet. Two gang members got each of my arms and lifted me up. My eyes were watering but I could see Bucky slip a set of brass knuckles onto his hand. He was out to do serious damage. He tried to hide his newly metallic right hand behind his left, so I wouldn’t know what was coming. He took a huge, overhanded swing and his iron-covered fist smashed into my face. I felt my nose break. It made a loud pop inside my head and I felt the blood coming out of it in a warm rapid trickle like I had a runny nose all of a sudden. I tasted it on the back of my tongue. The gang members kept me upright. This time Bucky took a huge underhanded swing and rammed my jaws together. I felt my teeth click and grind. My lower jaw felt like it was broken. There was more blood. I think I swallowed a couple of my teeth. This time I blacked out for a couple of seconds. Bucky took some quick shots at my ribs and body and fuckall and the gang members let me fall to my knees. They actually kind of shoved me to my knees. Bucky got in front of me and bent over, sticking that big blob of an ass right in my face.
I could smell the newness of those pants. One of the gang members steadied my head there close to Bucky’s ass.
I heard the fart before I smelled it.
Suddenly it was there, surrounding my head with a brown heat. The smell was the worst thing. Maybe even worse than the beating itself. Not only was it humiliating, it smelled worse than rotting fruit. It was worse than all the locked-up-in-a-hot-room shits I’d ever had in my life. It was like Bucky had at one time devoured an entire human and those were the gases released from that exploit, a sickening decay of flesh. I visualized that smell, a wet fume rolling out of that damp black forest. I felt my gorge rise and I vomited, the heaving action exuding an excruciating pain. My vomit smelled better than Swarth’s flatulence. Bucky stood upright again and overhanded the back of my skull with those brass knucks, driving my face into the cool wet ground. This time I went out for I don’t know how long. As I was going out, sort of a sickeningly uncontrolled spiral down into blackness, I heard his gang’s laughter fading and somewhere beyond that, I heard the bell, felt the warmth of my bile on the side of my face.
I think I woke up because I was drowning. I’m not sure if it was because of the rain that was now beating down in steadily heavy sheets or all the blood that was congealing in my nose and running down the back of my throat. Nevertheless, I woke up because I couldn’t breathe. I stood up as fast as I could. An intense feeling of vertigo surged up from inside, tilting me crazily back down to my knees. I stayed like that for a moment. At least until the initial pain and nausea passed. The only reason I tried to get up at all was because I knew Pearlbottom would have some sort of punishment waiting for me that would be more severe the later I was. Fuck it. What did it matter now? I’d already lost the sucker. That’s what really started this whole thing anyway, wasn’t it? Maybe now Bucky could shove the stick up his urethra and let Mary Lou lick the shiny green knob.
When I stood up the dizziness was still there but it wasn’t nearly so overwhelming. My head whummed with pain. I tried to focus on the school but it kept darting out of my field of vision. It shot out the far corner of my left eye and then came back in the far corner of my right. I took a few more moments to gather my bearings and then skipped back to the school because skipping makes me happy and I thought it might make the whumming go away. The skipping didn’t make me any happier, though. The only thing I could muster was a heavy-headed, broken kind of skip. I got to the classroom and accidentally went into the door at the front of the class because I still didn’t quite know where I was. The whumming made it impossible to think. If I had went into the back door I maybe would have had a chance to sit down unnoticed. Or, if not completely unnoticed, then at least less noticed. Instead, I nearly ran Pearlbottom over.
She turned to face me, real shocked-looking, like I was going to attack her or something. Her lips worked dryly against those Tic Tac teeth.
“It looks like somebody got into some trouble.”
And I was going to tell her all about it, even if I had to stand up there and yammer like a little girl, but before I could, she reached out and plucked a blade of grass from just under my nose. She pulled a Kleenex from the floral box on her desk and wiped her finger distastefully. She reached out again, turning me around by the shoulders, touching me with only the very tips of her fingers.
“Why don’t you just go on home before you can interrupt my class any more for the day.” She gave me a gentle push toward the door.
My shoulders slumped. They slumped anyway, but this time it felt like my whole damn spine hit the floor. I walked in the direction I was nudged. The whumming sound was huge.
“Oh, and Mr. Wallace?”
I turned back around to look at her and tried to say, “Yes, Miss Pearlbottom,” but I couldn’t move my mouth.
“Why don’t you shower up when you get home? You smell like death.” The class burst into laughter, peppered with random words like “molester,” “freak,” and “AIDS.”
I was sure I smelled. It was at that point that I was fairly certain I’d defecated in my pants.
I went home the same way as always, passing by the park. I didn’t have the energy to skip or whoop and I didn’t even really feel like it at the moment. The blobs had won today, I thought. The blobs kicked the hell out of me.
Drifter Ken was in the park, lying down on one of those thickly green painted wooden benches, sound asleep. He lay there on his back with his gray raincoat pulled up over his head. I was kind of glad he was asleep. I was really embarrassed about how bad the blobs had got ahold of me. I didn’t want him to see me like that. I also didn’t want to tell him about the sucker and my moment of weakness that had caused me to lose it. Drifter Ken was definitely not a blob.
He was one of the only adults I had met that wasn’t. He said he’d never graduated school. I was pretty sure he didn’t even have a job. From talking to Drifter Ken, I got the impression a job turns a lot of adults into blobs just like school does a lot of kids. He said a job would take a man’s will to live more completely than anything else. I believed him. I believed just about everything Drifter Ken said, mainly because he wasn’t a blob. I had made it a point to never believe anything a blob told me. I dreamed of a place that had absolutely no blobs in it. If I could have convinced myself a place like that existed, I could have had a little happier day.
Chapter Four
Racecar and The Wig
The parents had to be a couple of the biggest blobs I’d ever known. They weren’t always that bad. I mean, I didn’t always see them that way. Maybe I’m the reason they were the way they were. Maybe they were the reason I was who I was. Who knows? Fuck it.
To start with, there was the mother. Her name was Sadie. There’s a song called “Sexy Sadie,” I think it’s by the Beatles, that couldn’t come further from describing the mother. In fact, if you were to hear that song in your head while watching the mother in action, it would seem cruelly humorous. I’m sure most sons wouldn’t consider their mother sexy even if she truly was but the mother, man. She was a stout woman—very large and broad-shouldered. Quite mannish, now that I think about it. Never leaving the house removed any impulse she may have had for ever getting out of her nightgown. She wore the same gown for days on end. It collected all kinds of stains and worked up an odor that could be called rank even by the gentlest of standards. Even though she never left the house or changed her gown she went through the trouble of putting on her wig every morning, a sloppy brown thing she never managed to put on straight.
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.
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