Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  “David! Start the fucking car!” yelled Greg as we bucked forward another few feet. An obese cowboy with a holstered gun stomped toward us, his black truck at a standstill, like twenty others all around us.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy?” he yelled, pounding on my windshield.

  “He’s going to kill us!” yelped Greg, recoiling from the looming giant. “Hurry!”

  “I’m trying, Greg! I’m trying!”

  After a dozen attempts, I finally released and pressed the clutch and accelerator with perfect timing, sailing forward like a rocket beneath the freeway and through two red lights.

  “You’re going to crash!” yelled Greg. His flair for the dramatic had been intensifying during the first few weeks of sophomore year, as he’d become more obsessed with our theater arts class. “We’re going to die!”

  To be fair, I was going to crash. And we did almost die, a few times.

  “Pull over, nerd!” Greg demanded. “I’m driving.”

  For fear of perishing with me behind the wheel, Greg had been driving my car to school a lot. I picked him up each morning with a veneer of sweat on my forehead from the ten times I’d almost flown off an access ramp. But oftentimes, my mom would let me stay over at Greg’s, especially on Sundays, which extended the weekend for both of us—she in Seguin with Mike, and I in San Antonio with Greg.

  “I just love that you have a new friend,” she said. “And from a great family!”

  I neglected to tell my mom that Greg’s giant bedroom window was easy to sneak out of. I also neglected to tell her that Greg’s parents slept in a very secluded room at the back of the house and rarely laid eyes on me. I might also have neglected to tell her about our 2 a.m. walks to Stop & Shop for packs of cigarettes, which would be completely depleted by sunrise.

  Every school morning we woke up extra-early, after a three-hour nap, to brew coffee and get our looks together. Greg introduced me to a whole new world of hair products, which added fifteen minutes to my daily process. Side by side in the bathroom, we gelled and moussed our hair into a dozen styles before settling on one. Around 7:30 his brothers would groggily stumble from their bedrooms to find us perfectly dressed, styled, and caffeinated. On the way to Taco Cabana for breakfast burritos we’d smoke a cigarette and watch the sun come up. Then we’d smoke another cigarette and stop at 7-Eleven for more coffee. After another cigarette we’d arrive at school, bucking and rocking into the parking lot in my hideous blue tank.

  A few days before Halloween we arrived at school in our usual morning trance, still buzzing from nicotine. I walked into the courtyard wearing acid-washed Guess jeans and a New Order shirt, both borrowed from Greg’s closet, which was really our closet, in our room, in our house.

  “Hey Greg,” said Lisette, a perky, big-haired blonde we called a “Bowhead,” a girl whose big, ribboned headband made her head look like an ornate Christmas present. “Hi David,” she mumbled plainly in my direction, only because I was standing beside Greg.

  “What’s up, Lisette?” Greg answered her and slid his Ray-Bans down his nose, looking like Tom Cruise in a movie poster.

  “What did you do this weekend?” she asked, batting her eyelashes as she fluffed her new, poodlelike bob.

  “Not much. We just hung out at the mall and went swimming at my house,” Greg answered Lisette in his bored lower register as she twisted a clump of crimped hair around her finger. Occasionally she glared my way as if to say, “You’re still here?”

  “I got a joke, Greg!” she said, hugging her Dooney & Bourke shoulder bag. “What’s red and bubbly and scratches at the window?”

  “What?” he asked mock-excitedly, knowing the punch line perfectly well.

  “A baby in a microwave!” squealed Lisette, leaning against him as she giggled.

  I almost felt bad, watching her bask in Greg’s charitable fake laughter. I knew the sound of Greg’s real laughter. She probably never would. As we watched her massive crimped bouffant bounce away from us, I whispered out the side of my mouth, “When did her head become a dust mop?”

  Greg dropped his books and slowly slid against my shoulder to the ground, roaring with laughter until he was on all fours. I reached down to help him up but was pulled down as well.

  “You asshole,” I chuckled beside him as papers and pens spilled from my backpack. Students in the courtyard looked at us like we were weirdos, rolling around on the concrete, crying with laughter. Being perceived as a weirdo was an experience I’d thought I wanted behind me. But lying in the courtyard beside Greg, staring up at the sun, delirious from barely two hours of sleep, it felt okay. As long as I had Greg, I didn’t care what people thought of me.

  A few weeks later we went to the mall on Black Friday, which was a mob scene and made for some great people watching. We hadn’t noticed the goth crew in the food court for a while. But after an absence they’d returned with their leader, in all her purple-haired, prosthetic-nosed glory. Greg and I were fifteen minutes into watching the freak camp when we heard a familiar nasal squall.

  “Greg!” Lisette giggled from across the food court. Her massive hair bounced in time with a dozen shopping bags as her Bowhead posse approached us.

  “Ugh,” Greg sighed, ripping the tag off his new Erasure T-shirt.

  As the Bowheads neared the freaks, Lisette noticed Daphne putting a cigarette out in a cup of honey-mustard sauce.

  “Ewww,” Lisette cackled, pointing the freaks out to her friends. “Smoking is so gross!”

  Seemingly unfazed, Daphne stood up in front of the group and swept her hair back from her face, revealing a terrifying moonscape of foundation-caked acne. She locked eyes with Lisette as the Bowheads stopped laughing and froze. Daphne let out a shrill scream and ripped away her prosthetic nose, exposing a wet cavity of soft pink tissue that throbbed and flexed with each sirenlike wail.

  The Bowheads attempted to escape all at once, tripping one another as woven leather belts and stonewashed shorts spilled from their shopping bags. Scrambling to get up or crawl away, they stepped on each other’s fingers and fell over each other’s legs. Their screams sounded like the ones you hear in recorded 911 calls. One by one, they ran toward the Macy’s entrance as Daphne shuffled forward like a zombie. Lisette finally regained her footing and ran the length of the second-floor balcony, yelling until she was out of sight.

  A hundred shoppers looked on in horror, afraid to approach or reprimand the deformed girl in the Nosferatu T-shirt. In their wake, the Bowheads had left a small pile of shopping bags and scattered beads from one of their broken necklaces. Daphne hunched over the mess and made a great snorting sound as she plugged the false nose back onto her face. Two friends joined her and they picked every last bead off the tiled floor, even stopping an oncoming shopper with a stroller.

  “Careful, lady!” Daphne warned, picking up the remnants of jewelry.

  As Daphne sat back down with the freaks to model some of the abandoned clothes, Greg leaned into my ear and whispered, “Who wouldn’t want to be friends with them?”

  We had to infiltrate their lair.

  On the way home Greg played our favorite Book of Love cassette from the boom box in his lap as we jerked away from stop-lights, causing melees at every intersection. Pulling up to Greg’s house as he ejected the tape, we noticed something strange in the driveway. Right behind Johnny, who was doing power push-ups in a pair of tiny onionskin shorts, was a bright-red convertible Cabriolet.

  “Surprise!” yelled Georgia as we walked up the driveway. “Christmas is early!”

  Greg screamed with delight. “Get in, David!” he yelled, jumping into the driver’s seat. I sat down beside him in the beautiful beige interior and relished the rich leather smell of brand-new seats.

  “Look! A real stereo!” Greg yelled, pointing to the removable-front tape deck.

  “And I installed a CD changer in the back,” said Johnny, dripping sweat over me as he reached in to pop the trunk. “You can load it with a dozen discs. I
t’s fuckin’ awesome.”

  “David,” Greg exclaimed, “we can listen to music the normal way now!”

  “Yeah, normal,” I repeated, noticing the automatic transmission stick between us.

  “Now you both have cars!” smiled Georgia, momentarily staring across the street at my ugly, azure death trap. In the rearview mirror it looked so decrepit—boxy and boring, with a thin layer of midautumn Texas pollen covering its sides.

  Georgia kissed Greg’s cheek and went inside as Johnny excitedly told Greg all about the Cabriolet, a car that felt more like the one I should be driving but that I knew was so much more expensive than anything my family could afford.

  “Here’s the best part,” Johnny said, punching a button on the dash.

  As the top of the car opened over our heads, we looked up to the cloudless sky. Greg started the car and popped our favorite cassette into the Cabriolet’s stereo system. Book of Love’s “Boy” blasted from speakers all around us.

  “Those are special subwoofers you’re listening to, boys,” yelled Johnny over the mirror-rattling bass.

  “Yeah!” Greg screamed, hugging me as the lead singer cooed the lyric “I want to be where the boys are . . .” We bounced up and down in the seat midhug, knowing that our days of almost dying before first period were over.

  “You fags are too much,” Johnny said, patting me on the back with a smile. The word sounded different than it had before. And as I hugged Greg, listening to our music in our car in our driveway, I felt a little more like someone’s brother.

  Here’s Greg and me during our sophomore year shortly after we moved into a more New Wave aesthetic; lots of vests and hair gel during this phase. I believe we’re each wearing matching ankh charms at the end of those homemade, black yarn necklaces. Our favorite lunchtime offerings were these scalding-hot hamburgers that were microwaved in their own plastic packaging. Greg’s excitement over his burger might explain his look of surprise here. I’m surprised we allowed ourselves to be photographed during lunch. Eating was never very goth.

  CHAPTER 8

  This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave

  Fuckin’ wake up!” yelled Johnny, wet and naked, holding a balled-up towel over his crotch. “This fucking phone rang off the hook until I had to get out of the fucking shower,” he screamed, shoving a cordless phone into my face before snapping Greg with his towel.

  “Jerk!” Greg murmured, wincing in pain as he woke up.

  “Excuse me,” my mother asked through the receiver.

  “Mom? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “David. Your father’s here to pick you up,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

  I’d forgotten that we were spending Super Bowl Sunday at my grandparents’ house.

  “Tell me the address,” my dad barked in the background.

  I quickly washed my armpits and scrubbed my face to prepare for his arrival, trying to look awake in spite of the three hours of sleep I’d gotten. I went into panic mode, combing the dried gel out of my hair and pacing the bedroom.

  “Greg, I need normal clothes. Please! Something for church.”

  I looked at the options Greg laid out on his bed, the comb shaking in my hand.

  “David, it’s okay. What’s wrong?”

  “I just don’t want him to be mad,” I said, looking out the window as I put on Greg’s khakis. “We’re going to be twenty minutes late because of me!”

  “David, why don’t you stay here? Say you’re sick or . . .”

  A car horn honked. We looked through the window at my dad in the brown truck outside, his jaw locked tight, knuckles flexed around the steering wheel. He slowly turned his head until his laser-beam gaze stopped on us. Greg flinched away from the window.

  “God, David. He looks . . . mad.”

  I hugged Greg tightly and whispered, “He’s mad a lot.”

  My dad and I spent the first part of our fifteen-minute ride in nerve-racking silence. Over the hum of the engine I could hear his teeth grinding against one another. Each red light or delayed exit lane seemed like the final straw, the thing that would push him over the edge.

  Every turn, brake, and acceleration was loaded with the possibility of a confrontation. One that would make me sink slowly against the car door, trying to become a puddle that would evaporate in the sheer, blazing heat of my father’s anger.

  “Why weren’t you at your house and ready?” he asked as we arrived.

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot?”

  “Yeah, Dad. Sorry.”

  “We’ll see if I forget you the next time we make plans,” he said, braking hard in front of my grandparents’ house. “Now tuck your shirt in.” He got out and walked into the yard. “Hurry up, dammit.”

  “Sorry,” I said, fumbling with the seat belt. “I’m coming. Sorry.”

  My grandparents had lived in the same pink brick house since before I was born. The garage was a storage area, its walls mounted with taxidermied animal heads that had terrified me for years. A glass jar of dust-covered peppermints sat on the coffee table, untouched since the early eighties. The bathroom was still decorated with the little mermaid figurines I’d given names and told secrets to when I was a little boy. My grandfather sat where he’d been for as long as I could remember: in a beige La-Z-Boy recliner with a television remote in his lap.

  “Well hello, stranger,” he said, surrounded by a dozen relatives drinking iced tea out of mason jars.

  “Sorry we’re late,” my dad said over the television, shooting me a sideways glance.

  “Oh, don’t you worry about a thing,” my grandmother Oggy said, covering us in salmon-colored-lipstick kisses. “Come out back, y’all. We’re about to have venison and chalupas.”

  The large group moved out to the backyard to have lunch before the game. A massive ten-point buck hung from an oak tree by its hind legs, its chest and stomach splayed open. The men gathered on one side of the deer to listen to my grandfather tell the gory, detailed story of its murder. The women sat in rusty metal chairs around a picnic table on the other side of the deer, discussing their recipes. I straddled the space between the two until my aunt Jean called me over. At first it was a relief. But as my grandmother brought out her famous chalupas, the interrogation began.

  “So tell us about all the girls you’re driving wild!” said my cousin Janet. “You’re so handsome, David. You must have a gal!”

  The questions continued as I pigged out on venison, knowing that having a full mouth would give me time to consider my answers carefully. I chewed slowly, hoping a cousin would interrupt or my grandmother would ask for help in the kitchen or the deer would fall from its branch and crush me to death in front of my entire family.

  “My neighbor’s daughter would love you,” winked Janet as cousin Sharla added, “I teach a girl named Robin you should meet.”

  I wanted to remind them that I was a teenage boy, not a forty-year-old divorcé. As the ladies squawked and gossiped, I looked up into the dripping, scarlet rib cage of the dead creature overhead. With my mouth full of what used to be its body, I thought, Why can’t I be you right now? Swinging in the breeze without a care in the world? Hanging dead from a tree with no one obsessively questioning your burgeoning sexuality?

  An hour later we moved inside to prepare for the game, the women cleaning up in the kitchen while the men gathered in the living room. A half dozen beer cans popped open as the TV screen lit up with crowd shots of painted faces and giant foam fingers. I had no interest in football, choosing instead to hang out with Oggy and her gals. In the kitchen we’d gab about Bat Boy, UFOs, and whatever else had piqued her interest in the latest issue of Globe magazine or the National Enquirer. But as I moved into the kitchen, my father stopped me.

  “DJ, why don’t you stay in here and watch the game?”

  I sat down on the couch and watched the pregame coverage as a great-uncle and a second cousin slipped into coma-like slumbers. My cousin Brett started to rail agai
nst the Buffalo Bills as my cousin Fred decried the New York Giants.

  “They’re all damn Yankees,” my grandfather interrupted, holding the remote up to the screen to turn up the volume. “What the heck does it matter?”

  My dad exhaled loudly. I cringed at the thought that my grandfather’s behavior could be another reason for my dad to be upset on the ride home, when it would be just him and me. My grandfather cleared his throat and lowered the remote onto his lap with a quivering hand.

  “Bring me some more tea!” he yelled to my grandmother in the kitchen.

  Dutifully, she brought him his tea, sneaking me a grin on her way back to the kitchen. As retirees fell asleep all around me, I became transfixed by the pregame interviews on the television. Chiseled, meaty jaws flexed and forearm muscle striations danced as thick-necked Yankee men of various ethnicities discussed the game. As my cousin Bill’s sleeping head slumped against my shoulder, the camera lingered on a player’s rounded buttocks, the ghostly belt of a jockstrap visible through his sheer spandex tights. I tried to focus on the ladies in the kitchen talking about an endoscopy and then on the deer carcass swinging outside and then on the myriad of black fillings in my sleeping cousin’s open mouth, but nothing worked. My grandfather began to snore. The only other conscious person in the room was my father. There I was again, trapped with a rock-hard, brain-burning erection in a small space with my dad.

  “I’ll be back.”

  I burst from the room with incredible speed, knowing that the faster I moved, the better chance I had of hiding the lump below my belt. I slammed the bathroom door and dropped my pants, a multiethnic Rolodex of rippling biceps and bulging athletic cups dancing through my head. I unzipped my pants, trying not to think about the pastel bathroom full of Reader’s Digests and tubes of Icy Hot, but the inappropriate contrast only made me harder. Thirty seconds later I could feel it rising up in me—that wonderful building of staticlike electricity moving into the tops of my thighs and then higher, centering itself and expanding like a magnificent supernova. I heard a faint ceramic knocking that was getting louder. I realized it was the toilet seat moving back and forth against my shins in rhythm with my strokes. As my knees buckled I bit my lip, muting myself as an amazing rush took control of my body. I opened my eyes just in time to see myself ejaculate all over my favorite mermaid’s smiling porcelain face.