In an instant, I was fully conscious. It was almost like some kind of hyper-consciousness. I could taste and sense everything in the small house. I could see everything not only as it was but also how it would look a hundred years from now.
The mother sensed it, this thing that had entered me, the red crawlies feverishly pushing against the underside of my skin, forcing me into action.
And I could smell her fear, thick and sweaty like an old dirty blanket.
She was immediately on me again, trying to undo the straps, sensing she had done something terribly wrong. With newfound strength I shoved her off. She went careering dramatically into the back of the TV, knocking it onto the flimsy coffee table before landing on the whole heap. She looked at me from below her lopsided wig and mumbled words I couldn’t hear. Words I didn’t want to hear. Words I only wanted to end.
I hoisted the TV up above my head, imagining how much pleasure she had derived from it. How many hours she had spent catatonically staring into it and then I brought it down on her head. There was a brittle, shattering sound followed by something meatier, pulpier. I picked up the TV again. Her head was a mess. The wig was split and tattered. The face beneath was unrecognizable. Her legs kicked out in the twitches of early death. I let the TV drop again and her movements ceased.
In the time it took me to do that, Racecar had managed to reach the end table and was trying to pull himself up on it. I didn’t imagine that would really do him a whole lot of good.
He pulled himself up on the ends of his stubs, his arms vibrating with anger. The end table rocked and threw him off, a lamp tumbling to the floor with him. The light bulb threw crazy shadows across the room.
Grabbing the cord from the television, I wrapped it around my hand and gave it a great yank. It came out with a stretching pop. I took the frayed end in my hand and walked over to Racecar. Yielding the cord like a whip, I lashed the father with the plug-in. He yelped in pain as the copper bit into his skin. I got down on top of him and wrapped the cord around his arms, cinching it up tight. Then I rolled him over onto his arms, his back, where he rocked and rolled like an overturned beetle.
I grabbed the base of the lamp and knocked the shade off. Racecar stared at me and I realized, I think for the first time, that his eyes were blue.
He shouted words but, to me, they were just the facial contortions of the mute.
I stood overtop of him, that feeling dancing around inside me, and I slowly moved the lamp toward his eye socket. I pressed the hot bulb further and further into his eye, watching his screams.
Then I did the other eye.
I got down on my knees beside Racecar and wrapped the lamp cord around his neck, squeezing it tighter and tighter until it started to bite into the flesh and Racecar stopped moving.
I stood, surveying the room and, with a silent whoosh, the red crawlies crawled out. The feeling was gone, leaving me to swoon there in the middle of the living room. Everything became black and blurry. My body felt like a piece of lead.
This isn’t what I wanted, I thought. And with that thought, I passed out.
Chapter Six
The Room of Idols
I woke up in my bed. The bed was really an old army cot with some blankets thrown over it. The cot. That was another punishment. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the punishments were just some form of vicious cycle. The parents would punish me and I would fail or, more often, get sent home from school or suspended, the small failures I imagined culminating into a life of failure. The night of the particular failure, they would punish me. I, in turn, probably wouldn’t do my homework, creating another failure. The cot was what I got for burning my bed. I can’t even remember what the punishment that brought that on was.
I waited for the day they both left the house, which was a very rare occurrence. I yanked the mattress and box spring out into the backyard, went back in for the wooden bed frame, doused them all in gasoline, choked down one of the mother’s Basic Menthol Lights and threw the butt onto the heap. The rancid fire warmed my soul. I even burned my blankets on the fire. I presently used whatever dirty clothes I could as covers. I wanted the mother to come into my room each morning and see what a pathetic heap she’d turned me into.
That happened a lot, me waking up in my bed without actually falling asleep in it. I knew the mother put me there. Either that or she lifted me up and slung me over Racecar’s wheelchair and had him roll me in there. This latter technique resulted in minimal work for the both of them so it was rapidly becoming the preferred method. I usually stayed in my room but a lot of nights, the folks would both be asleep before eight o’clock. That’s when I came out of my room to do the wandering. Racecar often exhausted himself from rolling around the house continuously. Even when he kept the motor on, it was still a lot of work to navigate that machine at the high speeds he chose to travel. The mother’s drinks made her doze. If I knew they were both asleep, it felt like I had the whole house to myself. Some nights I would stay up late watching cable television. Mostly I waited for them to show something with naked women in it. Sometimes I watched music videos. For whatever reason, I never masturbated unless there was a woman on the television in front of me. I always imagined it was me who was sticking Mr. Lawrence inside of the girl on the television even though they rarely showed the thing Mr. Lawrence was entering and they never showed the guys’ dicks. Because the women on the television were never naked for very long, I usually had to be pretty fastidious about my beating off. Many nights I stood there behind the couch, the remote control in one hand, the other hand shoved down my pants and vigorously stroking Mr. Lawrence, trying to come before the mother moved and busted up the erection or, even worse, woke up. If she happened to come out of her mini- coma, I quickly changed the channel back to whatever she had been watching and scurried back to my room, my underwear wet against Mr. Lawrence and that whole area down there. It’s a wonder no one at school ever accused me of smelling like semen.
Whenever I couldn’t find an appropriate amount of nudity on the television or if I just didn’t feel like playing with Mr. Lawrence, I’d see what I could find to eat. It usually wasn’t much. Sometimes it would just be some mustard on a piece of bread. There was usually cheese or potato chips. Most of the food was something you had to cook and I never really knew how to use the stove. This was a process I refused to learn. I guess I was so happy some nights just to have the house almost to myself that I didn’t want to go to bed and I would end up just staying awake until I collapsed somewhere, usually on the couch or the floor in front of the couch. No doubt, sitting on the floor, the fresh linen- scented disinfectant that was sprayed there daily contributed to my drowsiness.
Usually, as soon as I woke up, I jumped out of the cot. This was for the same reason as staying up late. Waking up early was, many times, better than staying up late because by then the mother had usually woken up and got in bed with Racecar. Those were the mornings I could sprawl out on the couch and masturbate with wild abandon if they were still actually showing the dirty stuff on TV. Sometimes, on less lusty mornings, I would simply stroll around the house and enjoy the blue dawn. But that morning I couldn’t move. Getting out of the cot was like a physical reaction—wake up, jump out of the cot. Not being able to do that was something like not being able to breathe. My attempt to move felt like rolling into a wall of spikes. My whole body hurt. It throbbed and somewhere, beneath the swollen throbbing, a sharper pain twinged steadily along. I imagined my bones were grinding together, that’s what it felt like.
Gradually, I remembered what had happened when I blacked out, the pain serving as a hyperbolic reminder. I remembered the horns. I tried to lift my arms to the top of my head to see if they were actually there, but my arms wouldn’t move. It wasn’t like the numb type of motionlessness I imagined paralytics enjoyed. To try and move was to be punished by the grinding, scraping bonefeel. Damn it, this pain was worse than the two beatings that had caused it.
I remembered so
mething else, too. What was it, though?
Managing to tilt my head back, I heard the hard tapping on the wall behind me. The Wig had done it. She had strapped on the horns—giant, reddish-brown things sticking up nearly a foot in their arcing length. And I had one of them on each side of my head. Now that I knew I had the horns strapped on, I felt the thick hot leather straps running down both sides of my face in front of my ears and joining in a heavy itchy buckle that dug in under my chin. I don’t know how long I let that itchy buckle drive me insane. I couldn’t move my jaws around against the strap and itch it that way. The jaws had stopped working, too. And, of course, to raise my arms and attempt to scratch it would bring that grinding bonefeel on again, with its hot swarm.
“Fuck it,” I said, the dawn’s blue fingers filling my room.
I just lay there and imagined that Racecar and the Wig were roaming around the house so I wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on any time to be out there alone. But that thought, for whatever reason, didn’t feel right. Maybe my brain was as fucked up and out of joint as my body.
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach of a missed opportunity that was almost worse than the bonefeel. I had kind of a love-hate relationship with my room. When I was there by choice, hiding out from the parents or napping, I loved it. But whenever I felt like a prisoner in there, like when I was being punished or if the mother stayed up much later than she normally did, it seemed like the most boring place in the world.
My room was completely bare except for a poster beside my bed and a book that always changed positions around my room. The mother sold all of my toys a couple years back. She told me stupid demonshits like me didn’t need to waste their time playing with toys. I cried a lot at the time but lying there at age sixteen, I was kind of glad she’d sold my toys. There probably weren’t any sixteen-year-olds who still played with toys and I was sure I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of them on my own.
The book was called The Jackthief and, at the time, it was one of the few books I’d ever read and enjoyed. Every time I’d had to do a book report, since the fifth grade, I’d done it on The Jackthief. Since I was in my third year of eighth grade and had had old Pearlbottom twice, all I did was change the title. We didn’t have to bring the books in or anything and I knew if she remembered the title she wouldn’t remember what it was about. They just assigned book reports to make the kids be doing something, anyway. She probably just blobbed around back there and fantasized about eating kids or some fuckness like that. Maybe she fondled the dildo I was certain she kept in her desk drawer. It wasn’t like they were that interested in what eighth graders were reading.
Most of the kids just picked the shortest book off of a big list anyway. But that was stupid because it was something everybody and their pedophile uncle had read so, even if they got the reading done quickly, they had to put more work into the actual report. The Jackthief wasn’t on any kind of list so, if I’d wanted to, I could have just made something up. But I didn’t do that. I read it every time I had to do a report, which made it kind of honest, I guess. Besides, it was no easy chore to read every time since it was well over 500 pages. That was one of the reasons I bought it. The drugstore had other things by Holger Blackwell, but The Jackthief was the longest and it made me feel like I was getting my money’s worth. The mother had rolled her eyes and said it was a sick piece of trash, but she thought it was good for me to read.
The first time I read the book I was about twelve and I read it just for fun. It made me feel really smart to read a book that thick. I enjoyed the sex and violence in it, too. I must have read that book something like ten times. I had whole passages memorized but there was still something new that kind of jumped out at me when I read it.
I won’t attempt to tell you the whole thing but it was sort of about this guy who marries this really pretty woman and them trying to start a new life out in a country house somewhere in New England. But it’s really about the Jackthief. The Jackthief is something that is totally beyond human understanding. He’s kind of like a vampire but he doesn’t drink blood or any stupid fuckness like that. What he does is destroy everything else like the important shit around a human and, eventually, their very soul. That’s how they always say it in the book. They never just say “soul.” It’s always their “very soul.” He takes it, their very soul, away from whoever he’s decided to haunt. And this main character guy, the one who’s just married the pretty blond girl from New York, has been haunted by the Jackthief since he was a real little kid only it has to make some sort of bargain with people before it can take all these important things away from them. So, even though the Jackthief haunted this guy when he was a child, he couldn’t do anything about it because the bargain has to be meaningful. A kid would sell his soul for a can of pop, but a grownup has to think more about it.
So the Jackthief waits until this poor guy’s been married for a few years. And this guy, he’s a real big blob. I think that’s one of the reasons I liked that book so much. It’s like Blackwell knows what blobs are like and he makes this main character a classic blob and has the Jackthief be really cruel to him. Anyway, this blob is married for a few years and he starts to get bored of his pretty wife who hasn’t done anything to really make him bored—“variety’s the spice of life” and all that shit was this blob’s philosophy, I guess. So the Jackthief creates this other woman who isn’t real—she’s like a ghost or something—but she’s so beautiful that no man, let alone a blob, could possibly resist her. And this man’s been looking for another pretty woman to put his dick into, anyway. So when the man’s pretty wife is away at work, the man fucks this other woman. From the first time he sees her, he can’t think of doing anything else. He goes around for a while feeling really sorry about what he did. Afterwards, though, Blackwell makes the blob feel really guilty but mainly because the fuck wasn’t anything too special. The guy realizes he just needed to get it out of his system. A couple months later his wife tells him she’s pregnant and he’s overjoyed because he thinks the baby will bring them closer together and they live like this for a few months, blissfully happy, until his wife tells him that she doesn’t think the baby is his. When he finds out that his wife might have fucked someone else, too, he gets worked up into a psychotic rage and kills his wife by throwing a blender at her head. At the pinnacle of his rage he cuts her open and drags the baby out, dancing around the house with it, “wearing the umbilical cord like a necklace.” By morning, he’s cleaned himself up and decides to go to work. As soon as he walks in, the boss is standing there telling him he’s no longer needed, he’s fired. Then the guy says, “But we’re expecting a baby.”
The whole book builds to this great climax when the Jackthief sends this other ghost woman back to the blob and the blob follows her out into the woods because she’s told him that if he follows her then everything will be as it was before. Instead, he’s dragged into the heart of the Jackthief who ends up being this ancient spirit that forms itself from the black twisted trees and the moon above, with red dripping fangs and crazy angry eyes. The Jackthief forces the man to watch his house imploding and disappearing into the ground, his wife fucking another man, images of him dancing around the house with the fetus. Then the Jackthief takes the man’s soul and Blackwell has this really great description that goes on for a few pages about what it feels like when the man’s soul is being ripped from his body. It ends with the man waking up on the subway in New York and all the faces in the windows streaming by look like his wife’s. He wants to scream but he can’t. He doesn’t even remember much about who he used to be. It’s almost like he’s only a body, which I think is the best metaphor for somebody being a blob.
Lying there, cotridden, I didn’t feel like screaming. I was starting to feel comfortable. I wondered what it would be like if I could never move again. I could lie there and try to be a blob, without the twitching or fidgeting to separate me from the rest of the blobs. I wouldn’t have to go to school. The mother would bring m
e food because she’d feel sorry for me. I would read The Jackthief over and over and maybe try and get the mother to bring me more books by Blackwell. I didn’t think anyone could write books like him. Maybe he had a short story collection because really, short stories were much easier. To be honest, I thought there was a lot of stuff in the big books that didn’t really need to be there. Maybe I could even get a more comfortable bed to read those books in. Something adjustable.
Who was I kidding? Actually, this is probably what would happen: the parents would forget I was in the room at all, they’d think I had run away or something. I imagined lying there, getting thinner and thinner, too weak to yell. The parents would find me a few months later, one arm totally devoured, my mouth pulled back in a horrible bloodstained rictus. Or would the parents look for me at all? For some reason, I didn’t sense their presence in the house. Even though they wouldn’t have been awake yet. I found it odd that I couldn’t even hear Racecar snoring. I got that sinking feeling in my stomach again, except this time it didn’t seem so much like it was for a missed opportunity. No, it was for some other reason. But I couldn’t tell what. My brain still popped and sizzled.
The only other thing in my room was a giant poster of Bobby DeHaven that hung on the wall beside my cot. While reading The Jackthief showed me how horrible life could be, looking at the Bobby DeHaven poster made me think of how glamorous life could be. Bobby DeHaven was a true inspiration for me. Until I got that poster, he was a complete mystery to me. I’d heard his songs on the radio, when I still had one, and I loved his music. They played two or three of his songs all the time. There was something about it that really made it stick in my head. It got to where I’d be sitting in my room, all alone, and one of his songs would come on the radio and I would get up and start doing this elaborate dance routine.
One time, I was dancing to one of his songs, the one called “Little Heartmaker,” when the mother opened my door and caught me at it. I think she’d been standing there a little while before I finally noticed her. I immediately stopped, waiting for some punishment to follow. She just laughed and strumbled, “What the fuck kind of fit was that?”
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