by David Crabb
“Come on,” yelled Greg, pulling me toward the throng of dancing bodies.
“Don’t you wanna look around?” I yelled. “Maybe get a soda or something?”
“No! I want to dance!”
“But,” I stalled, looking at the otherworldly mob of purple-haired, platform-shoed kids dancing, “I’m thirsty, Greg. I . . . I need to find a bathroom.”
“But look at that cute guy over there,” he pleaded, gesturing to a shirtless, black-haired boy wearing a long rosary, “and that guy in the tie. I wanna go dance with them!”
“Then go dance!” I yelled over the pounding music.
“What?” Greg asked, pulling me closer as a sour-faced girl with four lip rings gave me the once-over. “I can’t hear you!”
“GO DANCE!” I screamed.
“Nerd,” Greg murmured. He released me and was sucked into the crowd like a minnow absorbed by a great, pulsing, neon jellyfish. I wandered around the edge of the thrashing crowd, past a cheap plywood “bar,” where a guy with chunky glasses was pouring Coke and Sprite into plastic cups for a buck. At the back of the club I walked down a long, black lighted hallway. Outside was a patio where thirty teenagers hung out, smoking.
“Bitch! I’m talkin’ to you, Mary!”
Out of the darkness stepped the girl from the line. She marched toward me like an angry drum major, trails of black silk flowing behind her. She looked like one of those Halloween ghost decorations you make by throwing a handkerchief over a tennis ball hung from the ceiling. She stopped a foot from my face and pointed at the unlit cigarette between her lips.
“Rock me, Amadeus.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Pleeeease.” She slowly dragged out the word like I had a learning disability. “Liiiight. Myyyy. Cigareeeette. Pleeeease.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, digging through the pockets of my pants and sweater as she tapped her metallic heel on the ground.
“Holy moley, Mary. How many pockets you got? Are you a boy or a pack mule?”
As I lifted the lighter to her cigarette, it slipped from my hand and fell onto the concrete. I bent over to get it in perfect time with her, bashing the top of my head on hers on the way down.
“Goddamn, bitch! Are you even licensed to operate a human body?”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I . . .”
“Just let me do the heavy lifting.”
Slowly, she bent over to pick up the lighter, keeping her eyes on me the whole time while guarding the top of her head with her hand. She sparked the lighter and held it out for me to see before bringing it to the tip of her cigarette. In slow motion she slipped the lighter back into my pocket. It was like watching a magician walk through the beginning of a “now you see it, now you don’t” trick. I knew she was mocking me, but I couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Glad I could provide someone a laugh tonight.” She exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke into my face. “My friend Ray-Ray was supposed to meet me here because he’s into some seventeen-year-old piece of ass who can’t get into the Bonham ’cause it’s eighteen and over!”
“I’ve never been to the Bonham.”
“Of course you haven’t, Mozart,” she replied, tugging my ponytail. “What old are you? Ten?”
“I’m actually sixteen, okay?” I blurted, defensively. “And my name is David.”
“Well well, little miss. There’s no need to get sassy.”
“Sorry. It’s just that my friend kind of left me alone and . . . I’ve never been here.”
“It’s okay, girl. Looks like we’ve both been abandoned. My name’s Sylvia, by the way,” she said, taking a long drag off her cigarette. “Hey! Wanna get high?”
“High?” I asked.
“Smoke out? Take a toke? Hit the reefer? Dance with Mary Jane? Insert euphemism at will. I’m supposed to save some for Ray-Ray. But he ain’t here. So let’s smoke up!”
I wanted to tell her I’d never smoked weed before, but she already thought I was ten years old. So I played along. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“It takes two to tango,” she said, staring at me blankly. “You got a pipe or something?”
“Um, no. I . . .”
Sylvia walked to a picnic table where a guy in a kilt was slumped on a bench over a pool of vomit. She slipped a can of Coke from the unconscious boy’s hand before yelling into his sleeping face, “Lay off the bagpipe, bitch!” She poured what was left in the can onto the ground and winked at me, saying, “Watch and learn, bitch. Watch and learn.”
Sylvia morphed into a flight attendant miming safety procedures, slowly turning the can on its side and denting the top to create a sort of concave bowl. She removed her crucifix earring and poked holes in the can at the center of the dent, the lowest part. Then she sprinkled weed from a Ziploc bag over the pinholes. She sucked on the popped top as she lit the mound of marijuana, making it crackle and glow in the dark.
“Here, girl,” she wheezed, exhaling a pungent cloud in my face. “Hit it.”
I placed my lips against the hole and took in a long drag. I tried to hold it in, the way I’d seen it done in movies, but I immediately felt an unbearable tickling in my throat. I clutched my chest and hacked a loud cough, a siren call for the stoners on the patio. An ebony-haired girl wearing a long black slip shuffled toward us with pleading eyes.
“Look, Morticia Addams, Mama ain’t got no more smoky-smoke!” hissed Sylvia. As she dragged me back inside, I began to feel a strange warmth in my neck and head. Moving through the hallway, I felt woozy and bloblike, like my whole body was a large cotton ball gently rolling down the hall. The eyes of the kids around me glowed a greenish-purple from the black lights hanging overhead. Their teeth looked dead and gray, like little radioactive pebbles glued into their mouths. The bits of dandruff on their black shoulders shone like stars.
“Bitch! Your face!” yelled Sylvia as she pushed me against the hallway wall. “It’s a mess!”
“Why do you keep calling me bitch?” I screamed over the thumping industrial music. “My name is David. David Crabb!”
“That’s a shit last name,” she yelled as she rummaged through her purse, which suddenly looked like a twenty-gallon grocery bag.
“Your purse is so big! Are you a bag lady?” I couldn’t stop cackling as I rubbed my spine up and down against the wall. “I feel like a cat!”
“Honey, it’s weed, not ecstasy. You’re acting like you’ve never been high before.”
“I haven’t. So thank you, Sylvia,” I purred, leaning forward to hug her.
“Now listen, snuggle bug,” she said, “you’re a sweet boy, but you need to let me fix your face!”
“What do you mean?” I asked as Sylvia flipped open a compact in my face. In horror I screamed, “Ahhh!!! My face!”
While the black lights were bringing out the eyes, teeth, and lint on everyone else, they were bringing out the flesh-tone Clearasil on me. My face looked like a nightmarish galaxy of glowing smears. Each covered blemish was its own green planet floating on my face; a dozen dots shone across my cheeks, nose, and forehead. “Oh my God. I’m polka-dotted!”
“Honey, you’re making a scene. Just stay still.” Sylvia spit on her hand and begin to rub her saliva into my face with a cocktail napkin. I shrieked and tried to move away, but I was pinned against the wall by her breasts. “Don’t move, Mama’s gonna fix you.”
“Oh my God. Your tits are huge!” I exclaimed as pencils, powders, and creams were applied to my cheeks and forehead. Completely stoned and terrified of this stranger who’d spit all over me, I went limp and let her work. Three minutes later she was done.
“Voilà!” she exclaimed proudly, dropping a handful of makeup tubes into her bag. “Don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you.”
“David!” Greg yelled from down the hall. “Look who I found.”
“Oh. Hi. Hi. Hi . . .” I said repeatedly to Raven and her crew like a broken tape recorder.
“David, are you okay?” Greg asked. “You seem
weird. Your face . . .”
Raven leaned in close to me and sniffed, her contact lenses floating on her eyes like blue stars. “He’s high.”
“David! You smoked pot? Without me?”
“Yeah, he’s baked,” said Raven. “And it smells like good shit, too. Skunky.”
“Skunky?” I asked.
“Yeah, skunky. It means you had some deep, funky shit. Where’d you get it?”
“Sylvia gave it to—” I turned to introduce her, but she was gone. “There was this girl. A girl we met out front who put her hands in our pants.”
“Ugh, her!” Greg rolled his eyes. “What a bitch.”
“No, no,” I said, petting his face, “her name is Sylvia and her purse is full of so much stuff and she did incredible things to a can with her earrings. And . . . this song sounds like razor blades underwater!”
“Um, okay, stoner,” Raven smirked as her friends snickered. “Now I want some.”
“He’s kind of right, though,” came a voice from the dark. At the back of the group I saw a boy with shaggy brown hair, wearing a tank top. His eyes were so blue it hurt to look at them.
“This is Jake,” said Greg, excitedly bouncing up and down to the beat of the music.
“Hi, Jake. I’m David Crabb,” I said, and smacked my forehead with my palm. “Why do I keep saying my full name? Ahhhh!”
As everyone laughed, Jake reached forward and put his hand on my neck, chuckling. “Dude, you’re so high!” He slid his arm around my shoulder as we walked down the hall. He smelled like a million amazing things all at once. As the six of us walked up to the bar, Greg shot me a look I’d never seen before.
“Greg, are you mad or something?” I asked.
“No!” He seemed uncomfortable, with everyone suddenly looking at him. “I’m fine. Jeez, you’re so stoned!” Through the cloudy haze in my mind, a controlling idea made itself known:
Maybe Greg is upset and jealous because Greg likes me and I’m talking to Jake!
“Greg, wanna have a cigarette out back?” I asked him.
“I can’t hear you,” Greg screamed over the music.
“Hey David,” said Jake, whose bee-stung lower lip was a few inches from my face. “Try this when you’re talking to people at a club.” Jake slipped his thumb over the little tab in the center of my ear, closing the canal. “See? Now I can yell and you can hear me without it being too loud. Cool, right?”
“Uh-huh,” I responded, feeling the warmth of his hand gripping the back of my head. His breath was heavy with tobacco and liquor.
“Want some?” he asked, and pulled a flask out of his jeans.
I leaned in close and ran my fingers through his hair, sliding my thumb over his ear before yelling, “What is it?”
“Whiskey!” He raised it to my lips and then passed it around.
Greg took a swig and then shoved it back between Jake’s face and mine. “Here. Let’s dance!” yelled Greg before pulling Jake onto the dance floor.
I leaned against the wall with Jake’s flask and watched everyone dance for an hour, my head spinning a little faster with each gulp of whiskey. Greg was busting all those amazing moves I’d seen in his bedroom, but now he was doing it for everyone, not just me. He and Jake wrapped their arms around each other’s waists as they screamed into each other’s ears. It had only been an hour and I was already getting jealous, thinking: I remember when Jake’s thumbs were in my ears.
Two hours later we all hugged good-bye around Greg’s red Cabriolet. Whatever was energizing about the whiskey and pot had faded away, leaving only exhaustion in its wake. I turned to hug Jake, only to find him and Greg sucking each other’s faces against a chain-link fence. And a new controlling idea took hold of my brain:
Greg doesn’t like you that way. Greg likes Jake that way.
In the car I was quiet, depressed that Greg was interested in someone else but excited about the prospect of meeting other boys who would touch me like Jake did: intimately, comfortably, without shame. I pulled down the visor to fix my hair and was shocked by the person looking back at me.
“Oh my God, Greg. My face!”
“Yeah, it’s amazing. What did you do in there when I was dancing?”
In the mirror I saw a face that wasn’t mine. It was the face of an effeminate mime or the cruel queen in a Disney film. Both of my eyes were thinly outlined in charcoal black, as were my eyebrows. My skin was covered in a fine, ashy powder and looked like it was carved of bleached ivory. I had a beauty mark under my right eye, and my lips were a deep, dusty pink. Smelling a familiar odor, I touched my face and licked my finger. My face was covered in flour.
“You look fucking amazing,” said Greg, smiling and turning up the stereo. “Good job.”
“But I didn’t do it. Sylvia did,” I murmured to myself. “And I never got to say bye.”
CHAPTER 12
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
As Greg and I pulled into the Glenbrook subdivision, we saw them. In the grassy expanse between the main road and the backyard fences, they were easy to spot. Among the wildflowers and drifting clouds of dandelions, four dark figures swayed in the grass. The black-clad pack of teen depressives trudged toward us, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke trailing them.
“Is that them, Greg? Is this it?”
I pulled up a torn sleeve to read the smeared address scrawled on my forearm.
“Wait! That’s Raven!” Greg pointed at the kids. From a hundred feet away I could tell it was Raven, her teased thicket of jet black hair magically defying the sweltering humidity.
She waved as the whole clan started running toward the car, a horrifying zombie-film motif most people would be driving away from. Jake’s hair was in a loose little ponytail, his chin-length bangs dangling over his crystal-blue eyes. Hector was a new friend I’d met a week earlier at The Rocky Horror Show. He wore a tattered tuxedo shirt buttoned to the top and sported a freshly bleached platinum pompadour.
“Nice hair, Hector!” yelled Greg.
“I left the shit on too long,” he replied, parting his hair to show a cluster of pearly blisters on his scalp. Everyone groaned in disgust, their various bracelets and necklaces jangling as Raven hopped into the backseat and the boys onto the hood.
This was the motley crew whose ranks Greg and I had quickly joined. At FX we’d met more alternative kids who went to our high school, the largest one in San Antonio, where it was hard to locate and corral all these kindred spirits. But weekend clubbing had given us the opportunity to make plans to meet at school. There was a spot beneath an oak tree in the courtyard populated by a ragtag mob of fishnetted freaks and black-clad cadavers chanting Joy Division lyrics and reeking of patchouli. After school we’d meet in the parking lot around my little Mercury Lynx or Greg’s Cabriolet, making plans to go to someone’s parentless house to smoke weed or drive downtown to buy CDs from Hogwild Records. We’d effectively fused our Monday-to-Friday lives with our weekend lives at FX.
“Hey boys,” screamed Raven, hugging us around our seats.
Jake gripped the roof of the car and slid his torso up the glass, grinning as his crotch dragged the windshield wiper.
“Hey Davey,” he purred, reaching through the open window to tousle my hair.
“Uh, hi Jake.” I could feel the blood rush to my head as he began to hump the hood of the car. Greg shot me a death glare, unhappy with this forward flirtation between Jake and me. Hypnotized by his blue eyes, I didn’t realize that my foot was slipping off the brake. Suddenly the car jerked forward, almost sending the boys sliding off the hood.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I yelled my apologies out the window, knowing that getting out of the car would reveal my slight erection.
“Onward, chauffeur!” Jake yelled, reclining against the windshield like it was a lawn chair.
“But you’re on top of my car. What if a cop . . .”
“Be cool,” Greg demanded, slapping my arm.
“Yeah, David,” whispered Raven, pinch
ing my nipples from behind. “It’s my birthday!”
My car lurched forward with Jake and Hector on the hood, rolling along at five mph. People on their way to church services craned their heads as we passed, their mouths agape. Young families and elderly couples flashed their lights and honked, as if I might not be aware that a small horde of teenagers was covering my car.
As the sun beat down, Jake stripped off his shirt. He shook out his ponytail and stretched out on the windshield, his skin tan and wet against the glass. As he squirmed to get comfortable, his baggy jeans slid down his hips, showing the top of his butt crack.
“Take it off, baby!” yelled Raven, chugging Mountain Dew.
Jake slid his pants down and pressed his bare ass against the glass, turning to smile at me before licking the windshield.
“David, stop the car!”
I’m not sure how long Greg and Raven were yelling before it actually registered. Greg’s knuckles rapped lightly on my forehead.
“We’re here, crazy! Wake the fuck up.”
“It’s okay, David,” Hector said, lingering behind to light his cigarette as everyone piled out. “His ass is kind of hypnotizing.”
To say that Raven’s front yard was messy is an understatement. It was deeply unloved. Trudging through the plastic children’s toys and knee-high grass, I wondered how the surrounding neighbors hadn’t shut the place down. Inside, Raven’s mother greeted us.
“I’m Barb! How are y’all?” she bellowed, a stream of Parliament 100 smoke streaming from her lightly mustached lips. Barb was no taller than five-foot-six and no lighter than 250 pounds. She appeared to be wearing a muumuu, but it could just as easily have been the floral fitted sheet from her bed, rolled up off the mattress that morning and stapled at either shoulder. She had long, dry hair that hung to her waist like graying streaks of hay.
“Have some snacks and shit, y’all!” She walked us through two dust-covered rooms full of yellowing newspaper stacks and ticking grandfather clocks. In the kitchen she presented a display of paper-plated food before lighting a new cigarette off the open flame of her stovetop. Raven rolled her eyes and hugged herself in embarrassment as Barb laid out the “snack station.”