Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  “DJ. It’s starting,” my dad yelled.

  I looked around at my grandparents’ things: my grandfather’s plastic shower seat, my grandmother’s giant canister of Final Net hairspray, the tiny tray on the toilet tank packed with geriatric prescriptions. I’d just pleasured myself in their bathroom while imagining complete sexual annihilation at the hands of the Buffalo Bills. I wiped my semen off the tiny face of the magical sea creature I’d whispered to as a three-year-old and felt utterly ashamed.

  I zipped up my gay pants and washed my gay hands, avoiding my gay reflection on the way out. In the living room, I was met with an explosion of applause. For a split second I feared that my fantasy football orgy in the bathroom hadn’t been as private as I’d thought. But the applause was coming from the television, where a stadium of people was exploding with cheers as a tiny black woman in a white tracksuit began to sing, “Ooo-oooh say, can you seeee . . .”

  Whitney Houston belted out the national anthem with more passion, skill, and grace than I’d ever heard. The camera zoomed in on her face, tears welling up in her eyes. The crowd sat hypnotized in quiet, dumbfounded reverie. Whitney’s voice was like a siren. As she sang, I could feel something familiar rising up in me: a staticlike electricity moving through my belly, into my lungs, and then higher, centering itself and expanding like a magnificent supernova in my chest. Her gaze rose skyward as she belted out the final note, her expression signifying a kind of hearty thanks as well as a pleading desperation. Watching this beautiful girl with black skin who looked nothing like previous Super Bowl singers, I was reminded that I was free, but that maybe I could be even freer. And maybe I deserved it.

  As a wave of applause erupted from the stadium, a silence fell over the living room. A dozen of us stared, wide-eyed and awake, at the television.

  “Hmm. That nigger can sing.”

  My grandfather sat in his chair, arms crossed, staring into the screen with dull, bored eyes.

  “Anyone hungry for pie?” asked my grandmother halfheartedly.

  Almost everyone walked into the kitchen for dessert, leaving my father, my grandfather, and me alone with the static hiss of the roaring stadium. My dad looked at me with sad, concerned eyes that seemed to say, Are you okay? Does it hurt? I love you, son.

  As he patted me on the shoulder and left the room, I wondered how it must feel to be that distant from your own father. Then I shuddered at the possibility of one day finding out, albeit for different reasons.

  I sat in silence with my grandfather as giant, glistening men ran back and forth across the screen, so many men I wasn’t allowed to want. I wondered if that pink brick house was really where I was meant to be. I hoped not, but the back pages of Interview magazine suddenly seemed like they were more than a few states away. Those photos were surely taken on a planet in some other galaxy. And on my planet, in this galaxy, inhabited by these people, I knew that I could be only so free.

  Staring at the television, my grandfather let out a long exhale and asked, “So, David. How’s the girl situation?”

  CHAPTER 9

  I’ve Got to Get Through to a Good Friend

  Over the next month, I started to feel my newfound optimism slip away. Even in Greg’s room on a Friday night, ensconced in the scent of a dozen Glade candles and listening to Depeche Mode, I was preoccupied, unable to shake an invisible weight that was starting to feel unbearably heavy. A small, familiar voice at the back of my mind had returned, and it was getting louder.

  You’re a liar and you know what’s going to happen, it said. Soon Greg will know. And he won’t like you. Go away. Be alone.

  “All I ever wanted! All I ever needed is heeeere . . . In my arms!” Greg sang, bounding from one side of his bedroom to another like a manic gazelle, doing backflips and front flips and generally bouncing off the walls. I watched him spin and leap, wondering how anyone could be that lithe and energized.

  I sang along the way I had in church when I was little, my mouth moving but no actual sound coming out. My hands trembled as I lit candles around the room with a butane lighter.

  “You ready?” asked Greg, sliding the Ouija board out from under his bed.

  “Of course I am,” I replied, the words coming from my mouth limply.

  Across the Ouija board I stared at Greg’s face, softly lit in an orange glow. His eyelashes looked like they were miles long, casting spidery shadows down the length of his cheeks. His brown eyes seemed hazel in the firelight, like they were lit from within. The little facial scar that I rarely noticed looked like a fresh, deep groove on his chin.

  “Tune in, Tokyo,” he said, rapping his knuckles lightly against my forehead. “David, what is wrong with you?”

  “Oh. Sorry. Nothing.”

  “You’re totally out to lunch.”

  I was trying to be present. All I wanted was to concentrate on the spirits in the room and believe in them. So I tried with all my might to focus on Greg’s questions for our visiting ghosts.

  “Will David and I have a good summer?”

  “Will we go to any good concerts this year?”

  “Will we try acid over the break?”

  If I could see past my worries and deficits and perversions and just believe in the board, then something mystical would surely happen. Something otherworldly would course through me, if I could only open myself to it. But all I could think about was how alone I felt at that moment. I’d never felt lonely with Greg before. In my head I kept playing the worst after-school special ever made: my father slamming a door in my face; my mother pulling her hand from mine as she broke into tears; my grandmother pretending not to see me in a grocery store; myself, older and thinner, sitting in a waiting room and then a doctor’s office and then a hospital bed.

  I kept trying to listen to Greg as he spoke to me, just the way I always had. But something had changed. Something was wrong now that hadn’t been before. A giant sponge outside my body was intercepting and absorbing all the stimuli I loved: the song playing on the stereo, Greg’s ecstatic smile, the flickering amber light against the walls and ceiling of his bedroom. I felt as if my happiness was floating in a cloud overhead and all I could do was watch it hover. I was hermetically sealed away from all my feelings. And I had to get those feelings back.

  I looked across the board at Greg, his head tilted back and eyes closed like a carnival fortune-teller. In the dim light of the room I could see the jugular vein in his soft neck throbbing beneath his skin. I imagined that I was a rapidly aging David Bowie from The Hunger, locked away by Catherine Deneuve and nearing the end of my centuries-long life. I imagined my teeth in Greg’s body, his blood in my mouth, his pulse fading into my being. But the thought wasn’t arousing or dangerously sexy. It seemed vicious and depraved. I didn’t want Greg to be my victim, or anyone else’s. I wanted him to be like me. I wanted a companion.

  The thought made me smile for the first time that day.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were vampires?” I asked.

  “Oh my God,” he grinned, “I’ve thought the exact same thing!” Greg took his hands off the planchette and scooted closer to me. “It would be so cool. First of all, we’d totally quit school, right? And we would go to the mall and steal a bunch of awesome black clothes, which we could do, because what are they gonna do? Arrest us? We’ll just turn into bats and fly out of Saks before they can catch us. But we’ll also be able to be invisible. There are at least three vampire movies where I’ve seen this happen. So I’m pretty sure it’s possible.”

  Greg rocked back and forth excitedly against my knees, still sitting Indian-style.

  “And then we’d write really nice letters to our families,” he said, fireworks going off in his eyeballs. “We’d let them know we were okay, but that we’d become creatures of the night and wouldn’t be able to maintain contact. My mom would be sad, but I’d send her money and jewels and stuff that I stole from Italy, where we would fly a couple times a year, just for the food. Now, I know we supposedly can
only drink blood, but I think we’ll be able to have lasagna and stuff too. Now, we will have to devise some sort of plan for killing people. I mean, I don’t wanna be a total dick, so what we’ll do is break into police stations by morphing into a fine mist, which happened in Fright Night and a few other movies. So, again, I’m pretty sure this is possible. Then you and I would steal criminal records and find people who got off the hook for committing awful crimes, like rapes and murders and stuff like that. And we would only kill THEM! So smart, right? We’d be, like . . . good vampires! But we’d still totally wear black and be sexy and stuff. Like, we would totally hypnotize hot people into making out with us and everything.”

  Greg slid the Ouija board over and scooted closer, his face a foot from mine.

  “The hard part, though, is this: how do we get bitten? The fashion and murder part is easy. Well, anything is easy when you can fly, hypnotize people, and become invisible. But how do we become vampires?”

  “I don’t know, Greg.”

  “Well, I do . . . Her name is Selene.”

  “Who?”

  Greg pulled out a plastic-bound library book from under his bed and opened it.

  “Selene is the moonlight goddess and mother to all vampires. I read about her here, in the Vampire Bible.”

  “There’s a bible for vampires?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s more like a history. We can call her with a vampire spell,” he said, pointing at a poem called “Ode to the Vampire Mother.”

  “Now, you’re supposed to read it in the original Latin, but there’s a lot of letter V’s in this one and I can’t pronounce it. So I’m going to conjure her by reading it in English instead.”

  I imagined our futures, wearing sunglasses in discotheques and nightclubs all over the world, avenging thousands of raped and murdered people by sucking the life from their dangerous yet alluring abusers, flying through the night sky side by side and returning to our glamorous New York penthouse coffins in time for sunrise.

  Greg placed the Ouija board between us and put his fingers on it.

  “We don’t really need the Ouija board for this since it’s essentially a spell. But since I’m reading it in English I think it might help or something.”

  I didn’t question his logic, as Greg seemed to have a profound handle on the business of functional, modern-day vampirism.

  “Okay, David. Here we go. Close your eyes,” he said, tilting back his head and letting out a moan. I closed my eyes as Greg began his incantations.

  “Oh goddess of the darkness

  Mother to the immortal

  Let me be reborn as your child

  Let your light absorb my own

  Allow me passage to the darkness

  As from your immortal womb

  Into the arms of your children

  To whom I will call brother

  Oh moonlight

  Let me be reborn as your child

  Guide the dark ones to me

  So I shall be born again.”

  I opened my eyes and looked down at the board as Greg finished. Our fingers rested against one another, almost intertwined atop the heart-shaped plastic pointer. Seeing his hand in mine felt more supernatural than if Selene herself had appeared, hovering at the window in her black veil, politely tapping to be let in to gorge on our blood.

  “Greg, I think I’m gay.”

  His eyes popped open, but his head remained tilted back, as if the muscles in his neck had frozen. Nervously, he looked over his shoulder at his bedroom door and then scanned his darkened room, as if one of his brothers or parents might’ve silently slipped in during his vampire prayer.

  “David, what did you just say?” he asked.

  “I said, I think I’m gay.”

  He closed his eyes and delicately placed his hands on either side of his face. It was a look of surprise I couldn’t decipher: had he just lost his entire family or won the lottery?

  “David! Now this might come as a shock to you, but I also have a secret. Um . . .”

  Greg hemmed and hawed for a moment, placing his hand to his forehead like Fay Wray in King Kong. The drama was palpable.

  “It’s so hard to say . . .”

  Greg’s eyes nervously roamed the room until they landed on the board between us. He placed his fingers on the planchette and looked up to some invisible force in the air above us.

  “Oh mighty spirit of the Ouija!” His eyes rolled back in his head as he inhaled. “Is someone else in this room besides David gay?”

  The planchette slowly began to move, my fingers barely touching it. It was like one of Greg’s dances; the most magical thing wasn’t the supposed ghost in the room but Greg’s level of sheer commitment and excitability. As the little plastic pointer moved to the word Yes, Greg’s mouth opened with glee.

  “David! It’s ME!”

  “You’re who?”

  “I’m gay too!”

  It took a moment for what he said to register. As it settled in, all the pieces snapped into place: the manic dancing, the excessive hairstyling, the endless replaying of “A Little Respect.” How could I have been so dumb? Looking at Greg across from me, with his beaming smile, his hundred bracelets, and his perfectly matte face, it struck me that of course he was gay! Just like I was.

  “One thing, though,” he added. “I’m probably bisexual, David.”

  “Me too!” I blurted without hesitation, knowing it wasn’t true but feeling like it provided a kind of safety net. “I still think lots of girls are pretty.”

  Greg and I spun our wheels for a few minutes, gabbing about how we would totally have sex with women like Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and Winona Ryder. Once we finished that obligatory little dance, I could say all the things I’d wanted to say for so long.

  “There are just so many cute boys at school, huh?” I asked breathlessly.

  “David, you know who I really like? River Phoenix.”

  “Oh God, I love him. But Keanu Reeves is the cutest.”

  “He’s good,” Greg shrugged, “but Christian Slater has such a hot voice.”

  “Yeah, he’s got a hot voice, but not as hot as Luke Perry’s.”

  We compared notes and gushed over our crushes for hours. We talked about who we wanted to kiss, what other kids were probably gay, and how nervous we were about what sex would be like. As we heard Greg’s parents walk into the foyer at midnight, we went silent, waiting for their footsteps to fade away into the back of the house.

  “I worry about my parents finding out,” he said, tugging at carpet threads. “And I don’t know what my brothers will think.”

  “I’m scared too, Greg. But I’m glad you know now.”

  I told Greg about my Sinéad O’Connor suicide fantasy and we laughed. But then I told him about that night in front of the medicine cabinet. He was quiet for so long that I thought I’d scared him.

  “Did I say too much?” I asked. “Sorry if that was weird.”

  “No,” he sighed, staring at the floor. “There was a time once when I was maybe eleven, twelve. And sometimes I’d go in the garage to jerk off, because I didn’t have my own room yet and I shared a bathroom that didn’t lock with my brothers. Sometimes, right after I came, I would feel so gross. And once, right after, I noticed this coil of rope on top of a toolbox. I grabbed the rope and started tugging on it, wondering how sturdy it was. I wanted to know how much weight it could hold.”

  Greg stopped talking and looked out the window. Maybe he would’ve finished, but I didn’t need him to say any more. So I hugged him. We held each other over the Ouija board for what felt like forever, our bodies limp, as if all the cartilage and muscle inside us had evaporated. I felt light as air, like vapor, like a ghost visiting a place I’d waited years to leave.

  As the sun peeked through the window, we decided we weren’t going to sleep. Today was a day to stay awake, to celebrate. Greg put on a pot of coffee. I opened the big bedroom windows that looked out onto the lawn. We wrapped ourselves in a blanket an
d sat in the window frame, our toes resting on the cold soil of the flower bed below. We sipped our coffee and watched the neighbors’ windows turn gold, reflecting the sun rising behind Greg’s house.

  “I was so scared to tell you,” said Greg, passing me our shared coffee mug. “You won’t tell anyone, right?”

  “No, Greg! You’re my best friend. Besides, why would I do that when I’m gay too?”

  “You mean bisexual?” Greg reminded me with a grin.

  “Right,” I smiled back. “Bisexual.”

  I scooted closer to him on the ledge as a cool wind blew past us. Maybe it was a cold front coming through. Or maybe it was a spirit there to transform us. As Greg rested his head on my shoulder, I knew it didn’t matter one way or the other.

  CHAPTER 10

  Scary Monsters

  Ouch, you bitch!” screamed Greg as blood squirted against my fingers.

  “I had to punch it in fast or it would never go through,” I said, popping the back of the piercing stud onto the earring. “Now let me put the alcohol on it.”

  “Fuck,” Greg bellowed, the liquid soaking into his punctured earlobe.

  “It’ll get infected if I don’t pour this on!”

  “Well hurry up, asshole!”

  “Mine hurt too, you pussy!” I barked as I shoved an ice cube against his ear.

  You’d think that after two teenage boys admitted a long-kept secret about their sexuality to each other there would be some sort of tentative period, a span of time in which they’d be cautiously honest and play it cool. Nothing could’ve been farther from the truth. Our coming out to each other was like opening a backed-up fire hydrant, releasing an unwieldy torrent of foul language, sex talk, and fashion experimentation. I stopped stifling my inclinations to wear eye shadow or paint my fingernails, because I no longer had to fear that they would out me to my best friend. Home manicures and Manic Panic hair-dyeing sessions ensued.