by David Crabb
“This is a pimento loaf I got at Piggly Wiggly. It’s delicious. These are my mama’s famous ‘ants on a stick,’ which are celery sticks full of cream cheese and raisins. I got some butter crackers here and bacon Easy Cheese for y’all, but I think Jenny took it into the living room. JENNY!” she hollered past us with unimaginable force. A tiny face covered in orange spray cheese turned away from the massive television and smiled.
“That’s my sister,” Raven moaned. “Don’t talk to her, or she’ll never shut up.”
“Don’t you talk that shit about your sister! She fucking loves you!” Barb screamed.
The tiny, golden-locked girl giggled, liquid cheese streaming down her chin, as Axl Rose fried in an electric chair on the big screen in front of her.
“She’s very cute, Mrs. Gunner. And your home is lovely,” I said, nervously trying to cut the noisy tension as Axl screamed, “Numma numma numma need-need. I wanna watch you bleed!”
“That’s Mizz Gunner, honey. I’m divorced,” Barb huffed, softening as she looked at me. “Well, you’re new. Where have you been hiding this one, Milly?”
“Don’t fucking call me that, Mother!” Raven groaned as Barb pinched my face.
“David, you are just a little cup of sunshine.” Barb released my cheek and led us into the living room, her massive smock swaying from side to side.
I leaned against Jake and whispered, “She’s like a walking duvet.” He chortled quietly and wrapped his arm around me. I could feel the warmth of his chest against my shoulder. As I glanced at Greg, he quickly looked away.
“Y’all can hang out in here or the backyard if you wanna smoke,” Barb said, furrowing her brow at Raven. “And by smoke, I mean cigarettes. Not weed!”
Barb lit cigarette after cigarette as she continued the tour of her home, each room containing a hidden stash of Zippos, matches, and butane lighters. Barb lingered in each room for several minutes as it filled with hovering shelves of smoke. Mid-sentence she’d stop and clutch her chest, shocked at the rays of sunlight suspended in tobacco clouds around us.
“Oh, good God,” she shrieked, reaching for one of an endless array of air fresheners that were stashed all over the house. She doused each room in Vanilla Fields or Cinnamon Stick or Ocean Breeze, waving the air around her with genuine surprise as we followed her out.
“Does she not realize that she’s the one filling this place with smoke?” I whispered to Jake, who buried his face against my shoulder to stifle his laughter. As Barb showed us a wall of family photos in the smoky den, little Sara began to hack like an elderly truck-stop waitress. Barb sprayed a noxious cloud of Tropical Summer through the gray haze.
“Mom, we want to hang out,” Raven interrupted. “My friends don’t need to know the whole fucking lineage of our family!”
“Oh damn! I’m sorry, baby,” Barb said, retrieving Jenny from the coffee table. “Let your big sister and her friends have some fun.” Leaving the room, Barb grinned at Raven over her shoulder and winked. “Okay kids, I’m off to watch my LA Law. Mi casa es su casa.” Then she disappeared down a clock-filled hallway through a corridor of smoke, like a gorilla in the mist.
Over the next hour a half-dozen kids showed up, each covered in an array of rubber bands and metal bracelets, torn jeans and safety-pinned T-shirts. We smoked cloves in the backyard and Hector taught us a few Santerian love spells with Mexican candles. I thought of casting one on Greg or Jake, which made me realize that they’d disappeared. I looked around the living room as Raven brandished an empty wine bottle and declared, “It’s time for Spin the Bottle!”
My stomach sank. I’d never kissed anyone, not even as a joke. I needed support. I needed my best friend.
I walked into the front yard hoping to find Greg and Jake smoking, but I saw nothing. Then I noticed my car rocking. The windows were misted and hard to see through. Every few moments the car would shake, and then there would be a muffled laugh, followed by a quiet groan. I wanted to open the door and yell, How can you both be doing this to me? You’re the loves of my life! But I wasn’t going to be the uptight one, the jealous one, the prude. I marched back into the house to find a dozen kids gathered in a circle on the den floor. I took my seat in the group and began assessing the situation in a positive light. I thought, I don’t have to feel insecure about this. I’m sixteen years old. I’m practically an adult.
“Where are you going?” I asked Hector as he walked outside.
“This shit is for little kids,” he deadpanned. “I’ll be outside. Have fun getting mono.”
I wanted to escape with him, but I had a job to do. If Greg could make out with someone, I could too. I took a deep breath and looked around at the circle, reminding myself, You can do this, David. You can kiss any of these people.
And then the doorbell rang.
A shaft of blinding sun cut through the smoky room as the door creaked open. A massive silhouette appeared, with long, wavy hair and a bright-pink headband. She wore bifocals that made the top half of her eyes gigantic and the bottom half microscopic. A too-tight belt cinched the middle of her blubbery abdomen. She looked like a fat, upright-standing ant. Worst of all, at the center of her face, where a normal person’s nose would be, was a complex network of bandages, like five or six thick slabs of bacon strapped horizontally above her mouth.
“Ooh, Spin the Bottle!” she squealed, revealing a mouthful of silver braces.
“Oh,” said Raven. “This is Pam.” As the girl shut the door behind her, Raven leaned in to whisper, “She’s the daughter of my mom’s friend. Ugh!”
“I’m Pam,” the girl repeated, breaking into the circle between Raven and another girl across from me. She lowered her ample bottom to the ground and sat Indian-style, adjusting her yellow plastic barrettes and grinning at anyone who dared make eye contact. And then she locked eyes with me, staring with her giant half-moon orbs as every ticking clock in the house came to a stop. A flirty smile stretched across her face, revealing an intricate network of neon-colored rubber bands attached to her dental work.
“Hi,” she whispered coyly, offering me a tiny, four-fingered baby-wave.
“Looks like David has a fan,” said Raven. Everyone in the group laughed, and Pam blushed. “Awww, cutie’s first kiss.”
“I’ve kissed someone before! Don’t be stupid!” I said, realizing too late that Raven wasn’t talking about me. “Oh, yeah. Pam. Ha . . .” I mumbled.
The tension was palpable as we began, each person’s spin nearly a death-defying risk. At any moment, someone would be kissing the gaping, metallic maw of Pam, whose loud mouth-breathing and laser-beam gaze remained focused in my direction.
Finally, it was her turn. She picked up the bottle, turned the spout toward me in midair, and then laid it back down on the carpet.
“You!” she beamed, baring her teeth and giggling. I looked around for someone to call foul on Pam’s technique, to save me from mashing faces with this escapee from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family. But everyone looked away, relieved that I’d be taking one for the team.
“I just had sideus surgery,” Pam said, mispronouncing sinus through the deformed inner workings of her mangled head cavity. She closed her eyes and leaned forward. Before I could take a breath her lips were on me, chewing and gnashing against my mouth like a dog on a rawhide bone. I could barely hear the group giggling through the mélange of sensory overload.
First there was the metallic taste of her dental work, like licking the inside of an empty can of tuna fish. Then there was the odor. Her flesh and hair smelled like synthetic fruit, or the stale plastic innards of a Strawberry Shortcake doll. I could feel the delicate scraping of metal edges against my gums, each dart of her tentacle-like tongue holding the promise of some gruesome oral injury. After what seemed like a minute I tried to back away, only to feel the immense pressure of her bearlike paws on my shoulders, thrusting me back into her mouth.
At this point, the group’s gentle snickering gave way to nervous laughter, the
kind emitted before something brutal and life-changing happens to a victim who at first simply can’t believe he is looking at a real human head.
“Come on, Pam,” Raven said, awkwardly chuckling.
As the strength of her embrace intensified, so did the powerful suction of her piehole. As this face-eating persisted, I realized the extent to which kissing is made possible by possessing a functioning nose. Without it, the act becomes a dangerous game of breath-play, complete with gagging, mucus-y sound effects. At one point, Pam formed a seal around my mouth so tightly that I could feel her drawing breath from inside my body.
“Pam, I think he’s had enough!” I heard Raven plead.
And then Pam coughed into my mouth. Sure, it was positively disgusting, but it freed me. My head jerked back like the guy listening to his stereo in the Memorex commercial. I wiped a pint of saliva from my face as Pam heaved and retched.
Catching my breath, I noticed Barb down the hall through a small crack in her bedroom door. She was laid out on her bed, lit only by the glow of LA Law through a haze of cigarette smoke. A grin spread across Barb’s face as she gave me a thumbs-up and a deeply unsettling wink. What had already been a disturbing first kiss was now, improbably, much worse.
For the next half hour we all tried to enjoy ourselves, but the party was unsalvageable. My new friends would chat with me and be extra-touchy, offering little hugs or shoulder pats as if to say, I know that was hard, but we’re all proud of you. I would take solace in this just as I noticed Pam watching me from twenty feet away, her face peeking around the corner of a storage shed in the backyard or partially obscured by a gauzy drape blowing in the living room. At every turn I could sense her there, sheepishly smiling whenever I caught her gaze.
I found Hector smoking on the front porch as a big brown station wagon tapped its horn.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Sasquatch’s mom,” he answered, straightening the cameo brooch at the center of his shirt collar. “She’s been here the whole time.”
The front door opened behind us as Barb helped Pam onto the porch.
“You get home okay, sweetie. And tell your momma hi for me, okay?” said Barb, patting Pam’s butt as she stepped into the yard.
“Bye, Daniel,” Pam giggled, with her creepy little finger-wave.
Hector chuckled. “Wow, your first love doesn’t even know your fucking name.”
Pam’s mother got out of the front seat and walked around the car to open the back door. She strapped her daughter in and got back in the driver’s seat, like a chauffeur. Pam leaned her face against the window and continued to wave good-bye, the glass in front of her mouth fogging up with hot, strawberry breath. As it occurred to me that Pam might be even more “special” than I’d first assumed, Greg and Jake emerged from the backseat of my car. Gazing out on the tableau as Pam and her mother pulled away, I couldn’t help but compare Greg’s party experiences and mine. Greg had made out with Jake. Jake had made out with Greg. I’d made out with a large, semideformed simpleton with a mouth full of razor blades.
I could taste blood on my lip as Greg tucked in his shirt and asked, “What did we miss?”
I glared at him silently as he went inside with Jake. Hector passed me a lit clove. “Don’t worry, dude. You’ll hook up with Jake eventually. Everybody does.”
I took a long drag off the clove, reminding myself that I could finally cross “first kiss” off my list. Watching Greg lean against Jake through the kitchen window, I hoped my second one would be better.
CHAPTER 13
Under the Milky Way Tonight
I don’t understand how it can get you high if it’s just a piece of paper,” said Greg, fingering the tiny blue square in his palm.
We’d been sitting in Greg’s room for half an hour, contemplating our hits of acid. We’d gotten them from a dealer at school a few days earlier, and we’d been waiting until the weekend to take them. My mother had gone camping with Mike and was letting me spend the next four days with Greg, whose parents would be away the entire time.
“What if we overdose, Greg?”
“You have to stop being such a pussy. You can’t OD unless you take a whole lot. Like that guy who stuck the whole sheet down his shirt and then ran from the cops for half an hour!”
“That guy went to Judson High School! I heard he’s going to be in a padded cell for the rest of his life!”
We’d all heard of the guy who absorbed a sheet of acid through his sweat, and the girl who took too much and cut off her face, and the guy who thought there was a bee in his head and ripped his ears off with a corkscrew. These were the ghost stories of the alt crowd. Bowheads and preps told campfire tales about the deformed Donkey Lady who lived under a bridge by the river, while all the kids in black whispered about the girl who took five hits of white blotter and, thinking her beloved Persian cat was too cold, blew it up in the microwave.
“David! This is the perfect time. My parents are gone.”
“I guess we can call Jake or Raven for help if something goes wrong.”
“No, David! I want to do this with just you the first time. What if I freak out, or look weird, or it’s like a truth serum? I’ll tell Jake I think I love him and it’ll be awful!”
“Fine,” I replied, miffed that Greg’s crush was becoming love.
Sitting on our tiny bed islands, we looked into each other’s eyes.
“Whatever happens, David, I love you!”
“I love you too, Greg! You’re my best friend.”
We placed the bits of paper on our tongues and sat motionless, staring at each other from across the room.
“What happens now?” I mumbled through closed lips.
“Uh-oh-uh.”
“Huh?”
“I. Don’t. Know,” answered Greg, careful to keep the hit on his tongue.
Twenty minutes later we were angrily stomping around the kitchen.
“I can’t believe we gave that dude ten dollars for that!” Greg complained, taking a hot cookie sheet of pizza bites out of the oven. “He gypped us!”
“What a jerk! And we could’ve gone to FX tonight,” I said, popping a pizza bite into my mouth. As Greg poured a second round of Captain Morgan and Coke, I noticed that the pizza bites tasted odd. Something wasn’t right with the texture. I had to have another one to figure it out. I chewed carefully, with intent, trying to suss out each element of flavor and understand what was going on in my mouth. But the pizza bite eluded me. I popped another one in my mouth and closed my eyes. My mouth was suddenly full of the most disgusting material ever created by man. I opened my eyes to see Greg staring out the kitchen window, tracing his wet finger along the glass and humming.
“Greg! Who is outside?” I asked.
Greg turned to me with giant black eyes and whispered, “Everyone!”
I looked down at the empty cookie sheet. I had eaten twenty pizza bites.
“Greg! I ate too much. Drive me to the hospital.”
“We can’t drive, David.”
“You’re right. Oh no! I’m afraid I’m going to drive!”
I imagined myself the victim of an ill-intentioned hypnotist, sobbing as I pressed my possessed foot on the gas pedal and flew off the I-10 overpass to my death. I pulled out my car keys and threw them at Greg. “Here! You’ve got to keep me out of that car!”
Greg looked into his hand like he was holding the key to launch a wad of nukes. “It’s too much responsibility,” he said, throwing them back. “What if I end up driving? What if I can’t stop myself?”
“Greg, you’ve got to be strong!” I threw the keys back at him. We stood in the kitchen like this for several minutes/hours/weeks, throwing the car keys back and forth in a psychotic game of hot potato. And then it happened. Everything clicked into place. Every single thing made sense. In some wordless, inexplicable way, the truth of the whole world came crashing in.
“Greg! I understand everything!” I looked into Greg’s dilated pupils.
I grabbed his shoulder. “Greg, it’s happening. We’re tripping!”
“Oh. My. God. David! We’re tripping!” We threw our arms around each other, laughing as we hopped up and down in the center of the kitchen.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Greg and I looked toward the foyer, mid-embrace, to see Johnny.
“We made food!” Greg blurted out as I realized that we were both wearing oven mitts.
“Jesus Christ, you’re a couple of weirdoes,” Johnny grunted. Greg and I remained frozen in each other’s arms, staring at Johnny, as if stillness might camouflage our altered state.
“Um, okay, freaks. I’m going to work out.” As Johnny trudged down the hallway, we remained entangled. Hearing his door shut, we tiptoed to Greg’s room.
“Shhh,” whispered Greg, shutting his door. “I want to show you something.”
Greg pulled out a shoebox from under his bed and removed the lid, revealing the most beautiful pair of bright-blue, ten-hole Doc Marten boots.
“My mom got them yesterday,” Greg said, handing me the boots. “They were a hundred and forty dollars.” We rubbed the smooth heels on our faces and inhaled the thick odor of leather and rubber. Greg leaned toward me and said, “I think these shoes are magical.” The whites of his eyes glowed from within.
“It’s true,” I whispered back. “Hey. Let’s listen to some music.”
“David, why are we whispering?”
“I don’t know!” I whispered back loudly. Moments later, The Smiths’ “Shoplifters of the World Unite” began blasting through the stereo and we were immediately on our feet, reenacting our favorite FX dances: the “I’m Balancing on a Tightrope” walk, the “Help, I’m Caught in a Sexy Spiderweb” sway, the “Here, Let Me Erotically Deal this Deck of Cards” hand flourish.