Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  Before you get all judgy concerning the over-the-top nature of this particular photograph, know that it was Halloween, the one night of the year when I could let my general fashion sense become a mockery of itself. I made those vinyl pants myself, which explains why the ass split on the dance floor an hour later. All things considered, it was a blessing, as my undercarriage was a moist pit of discomfort. Sylvia mocked my complaining, saying “Honey, vinyl doesn’t breathe. Bitch, you got swamp-ass!” Luckily the cape covered my exposed butt the rest of the night. Also, I think we can all agree that the spookiest thing about this photo is the china hutch behind me.

  CHAPTER 15

  Smash Every Tooth in Your Head

  As the credits to Fried Green Tomatoes rolled, Mike silently wept beside me. Over the last few months I’d discovered that my mom’s boyfriend was a big softie.

  “Aw, hell. My allergies are killin’ me,” Mike murmured as my mom handed him a tissue from her purse. His son and daughter, Mickey and Sarah, sat beside me as their father had one of his “allergy attacks,” which commonly took place during reruns of Little House on the Prairie and ASPCA commercials.

  “Oh honey,” my mother said, rubbing Mike’s back.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. The air’s just so gosh-darn dry in here.”

  Sarah covered her face and giggled at her dad as her older brother shot her a look. Mickey was twelve and Sarah was nine. As a queer, goth sixteen-year-old, I couldn’t have had less interest in two preadolescents who were growing up on a farm in a town known for its giant legumes.

  “Can I go now, Mom?” I asked, impatiently twirling the pentagram pendant hiding under my shirt. “Greg and I are watching a movie tonight, and he’s waiting for me.”

  “But I thought you were going to have dinner with us?”

  “Oh, Teri. Let the boy go have fun with his friends,” Mike said, patting my leg. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “You mentioned you needed gas earlier. So take this.”

  I thanked Mike and pocketed the cash as he wiped his cheeks. In truth, Greg and I wouldn’t be watching a movie at all. We’d be going to FX. I was the designated driver, which meant I couldn’t get too fucked up. So tonight, I was going to be the adult. Tonight, I was going to practice moderation.

  A few hours later I was tripping my balls off in the FX parking lot. I had tried to be good, but the setting made it impossible. How was I supposed to be good with Jake and his flask sidling up to me on the dance floor?

  “No, Jake. I don’t want a drink. But . . . Okay. I’ll have a sip. One sip.”

  Later, on the patio, Raven handed me a joint as our favorite song played.

  “I can’t. I’m driving. Well . . . Okay, but I’m only having one toke.”

  Around midnight Greg cornered me in the bathroom and took out a tiny hit of acid.

  “Greg, I can’t! I’m driving. Well, okay . . . I’ll just have a corner of the tab.”

  Over the course of three hours, this kind of “moderation” equaled one very fucked-up sixteen-year-old.

  By midnight I was a mess. The four quarter-hits of Blue Angel acid I’d eaten had taken hold. I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I was trying to get some fresh air and clear my head in the parking lot, but everything I saw warranted committed investigation. Concrete, tree bark, corrugated metal, and car windshields all demanded my deep and profound reflection. “Acid spiders” were creeping in and out of my peripheral vision, like a million little daddy longlegs crawling at the edges of my eyes. The muscles in my jaw kept involuntarily twitching, as if tiny hives of larval worms were uncoiling beneath my molars. I kept hearing a bizarre, metallic vibration coming from somewhere in the night.

  Oh wait. That’s my teeth.

  Over the muffled din of Nine Inch Nails I heard the sound of an approaching banshee getting closer and closer, until my ears felt like they were bleeding. Then it appeared above me in the sky: a plane coming in for a landing at the edge of the tarmac a few hundred yards away. The plane seemed so close that I tried to reach up and touch it. As it disappeared behind the club’s roof I noticed the Pepper Creek Family Dental sign: a fluorescent light box depicting a glowing, smiling tooth with feet and Hamburger Helper–gloved hands. He held a big red toothbrush and offered a hearty thumbs-up, his bright-blue eyes peering into me like they’d seen things . . . awful things.

  This sign sent me into an existential crisis.

  Does that tooth know what it is? I thought. Does that tooth have teeth of its own?

  I touched my jaw as it flexed and quivered behind my skin. As I stood there all alone in the parking lot, listening to the distant thump of “Down in It,” it hit me.

  My teeth have teeth!!!

  As the nightmare of these infinite dental Russian dolls took hold of me, the door to the club opened. Two girls in baby-doll dresses stumbled down the stairs and came to a sudden stop upon noticing me. I realized that most of my right hand was inside my mouth. I quickly removed it, nonchalantly wiping saliva on my pants.

  “I’m out of cigarettes,” I blurted, thinking in some spontaneous fit of drug-addled logic that this would explain why I was devouring my hand. The girls ignored me and proceeded to make out on the hood of a VW Bug. Carefully I crept back toward the entrance of the club, strangely worried they might catch me and demand I stay.

  No. You! Weirdo. Stand here and continue to fist your face as we kiss!

  Back inside, the lights looked like they were melting from the ceiling in great, glowing drips. I had a bad case of the Icky Strickies: stomach cramps from the strychnine in the acid. My heart was pumping out of my chest to the beat of the kick drum. I thought to myself, How is the DJ still playing Nine Inch Nails? Has he played even one non–Nine Inch Nails song since I’ve been here? As Trent Reznor screamed, I found that I couldn’t think of a single song in the world that wasn’t a Nine Inch Nails song. “Down in It,” “Sin,” “Enjoy the Silence,” “Like a Prayer,” “Mr. Bojangles,” “The Greatest Love of All” . . . ALL by Nine Inch Nails!

  I neared the dance floor and passed a hippie-goth chick covered in a thousand pimples and an oversize 10,000 Maniacs shirt. She screamed in my face, revealing a horselike set of chompers covered in braces. Her teeth seemed to swell from her mouth like tiny white balloons trapped in metal cages.

  “Be careful! THE SKINHEADS ARE HERE!”

  A chill ran down my spine. Skinheads had invaded FX three times in the last month. They were the mortal enemies of freaks. To an extent, they were just like us. We were all stuck in Texas aspiring to be like the New York punks and angsty European bands we loved. But skinheads’ idols and interests made them dangerous. Their identities were based on a sociopolitical divide that simply didn’t exist in the suburbs of San Antonio in 1990. These guys weren’t neo-Nazis or a burgeoning labor party in Manchester. They were just jerks who met at Dairy Queen for Butterfinger Blizzards to talk about who they’d finger-banged. They didn’t spend the weekend picketing labor laws; they spent it bashing “fags.” And that was the problem. Skinheads: they ruined everyone’s good time.

  As my eyes refocused in the darkness, I saw six of them gathered in the middle of the dance floor. They were marching in slow motion around some poor sucker they were about to beat the hell out of. All the FX regulars were pressed against the walls, sipping their sodas and peering timidly through their teased bangs, waiting for this episode to come to an end.

  And then I heard it: Greg’s sharp, high-pitched yelp.

  The poor sucker trapped in the center of that skinhead huddle was my best friend. I noticed Carla in the corner, covering her eyes as they began to beat him. I wanted her to look at me, as if we’d lock eyes and instantaneously conceive a plan of attack and jump in with crazy ninja skills to save Greg. I tried to picture our small clan of pale, calligraphy-loving bisexuals fending off seven massive skinheads. It wouldn’t work.

  The club began to empty as the beating continued to blaring industrial music. I stood there under violet strobe lights and
watched the whole thing play out like a flickering slide show, photo after photo of wet skin and bared teeth, mouths in the shape of the word faggot and strings of spit suspended in the air like ice sculptures. The kick drum of the music was impossibly loud, but somehow I could still hear Greg screaming. And then I noticed that the DJ had stopped spinning. There was no music. That incessant, pulverizing beat was coming from behind my sternum.

  After a while I opened my eyes, not realizing they’d been closed. I’d retreated twenty feet back into the narrow hallway leading out of the club. I inhaled a waft of warm, strawberry-scented smoke from the fog machine as the skinheads approached me. Their oily, shining heads reflected the club lights above like domed mirrors. I pressed myself against the wall and watched them pass by, laughing and tossing a pair of bright-blue Doc Marten boots back and forth.

  In the car, Greg was hysterical and barefoot. The passing streetlights looked like glowing streamers, and my spine was melting into the driver’s seat. I tried to filter out Greg’s psychotic screaming as the little white dotted lines in the road became albino gerbils and scattered all over the highway.

  “David! What the fuck happened in there?”

  “I’m sorry, Greg. I’m sorry . . .” I repeated, grinding my molars against one another as the streetlights ahead became an on-ramp to a spaceship.

  “I was just minding my own business and they crowded around me! They took my fucking SHOES!!!”

  “I know, Greg. It’s really—”

  “My favorite Doc Martens! They TOOK them! And my face!” Greg pulled down the visor and shrieked at his lumpy eye in the mirror. “My face is deformed forever!”

  “Just calm down, all right?” I said, my trip intensifying as Greg ramped up the theatrics. “We’re going to follow Carla to her friend’s house and put ice on it!”

  “Ice?! I have been through a trauma, David! I’m going to look like Sloth from Goonies!” Greg leaned over to show me his eye under the interior light. “Look at my eye!”

  “I’m trying to drive! I can’t look at your eye! I’m tripping really hard, okay?”

  “Is there blood? It feels wet now. Do I have a weird blood-eye?”

  Greg yelled and punched the dashboard for another ten minutes before we arrived at George’s house at 3 a.m. George used to go to Gunther High School with us until he turned eighteen and inherited a bunch of money from his dead mother’s life insurance. He immediately dropped out, bought four cars, and moved into his own place, which became a halfway house and party destination for all the runaways, drug dealers, and delinquents from our school.

  As we walked in, two guys in Sid Vicious shirts were doing lines of blow off a glass coffee table. My eyes were tricked by the table’s reflection, and for a moment I thought the table was a box with two guys inside who were popping out to kiss the pair of men sitting on the couch.

  I plopped Greg down on the black leather couch and rushed into the kitchen.

  “Where are you going? David! My face!”

  “Move!” I screamed to a tranced-out girl who was staring at water rushing over her hand beneath the faucet. She looked at me with large, empty eyes.

  “It won’t come off,” she murmured.

  I gathered ice in a plastic bag and looked down at her pink, pruning hand, which was completely free of any marks.

  “Here,” I said, shoving a roll of paper towels at her. “You already got it off!”

  I could hear Greg wailing in the living room as I left her in the kitchen, smiling at the realization that she’d finally removed something that had never been there. I ran down the hall and tore through the bathroom cabinets, looking for a towel.

  “David! My face!!!” Greg screamed hysterically as I entered the living room. I turned the corner, prepared to smack his perfect face, but I was totally unprepared for what I found. Bright-red blood projectile-squirted through Greg’s fingers as he held his face. Wet crimson cascaded down his arm and neck as various inebriated weirdos gathered around.

  Stone-cold sobriety took hold of my entire being. Greg wasn’t overreacting. His face truly was ruined, and now my best friend would be blind. As I stepped forward to help him, a small black mass of velvet and crucifixes appeared between us. The smell of cheap perfume and Lubriderm enveloped me. A familiar girl with a nest of peach-colored hair glared at me from behind her black tarantula eyelashes and blew a huge plume of Marlboro Light smoke into my face.

  “He’s not bleeding, Miss Thang!” she blurted in a nasal South Texas whine. “I just put a raw steak on his nellie face to stop the swelling.” She reached up and flipped over the slab of pink beef covering Greg’s eye. “Girl, you gotta keep the cool side on that shit!” she wheezed as bloody tears dripped down his cheek.

  It was my unlikely angel: Sylvia.

  “Am I shining? What about over here? Am I shiny in this light? What about my forehead? Is it shining? My nose? Is it shiny?”

  Here is Greg beating the fuck out of his face behind a bleacher in 3rd-period gym class. Although our looks were still pretty tame during this time this was taken, we both already understood the value of having sheenless, matte faces. Greg carried this damn compact with him everywhere, eradicating any perceived shine the moment he felt the slightest humidity, which was all the time in San Antonio.

  CHAPTER 16

  She’s in Parties

  Author Jacqui Rivait is credited with the quote “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Dorothy Parker would later famously say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Sylvia, had she written, would have said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, I’ll say something worse. And if it’s about me, I will read your hair for filth!”

  Reading was one of the many gay terms I learned from Sylvia. She’d shown us a documentary called Paris Is Burning, about drag queens in the New York City ball scene. Greg and I became obsessed with the movie and added a liberal dose of terms like shade, work, and Miss Thang to our daily vocabulary.

  Hearing Sylvia’s “language” evolve on the spot was quite an experience. When we’d introduced her to Raven at a party, they’d had a disagreement over the true meaning of a Yaz lyric. Things got heated, as they usually did between Sylvia and anyone else with a vagina, and Sylvia called her a cunt. As Raven stormed from the room, Sylvia continued to scream.

  “You’re a cunt. Goodbye, cunty! Whatever, Kunta Kinte! Keeping walkin’ back to your slave shack! [Tongue clicking and lip-popping]”

  Sylvia had drawn a phonetic comparison between cunt and Kunta Kinte, a character from the PBS slave saga Roots, which led to a series of racist jokes and, finally, vague insults in some made-up African dialect. Not only was it incredibly offensive, but it also made no sense. There weren’t many people whiter than Raven or Sylvia, in ethnicity or actual skin color. Additionally, Sylvia didn’t have a racially-biased bone in her body. It wasn’t so much that she singled out any one type of person for her disparaging remarks as it was that everyone in her path was fair game. And once you crossed Sylvia, every aspect of your person was up for reading, regardless of whether or not it was politically correct.

  One night on the FX patio, after digging through her purse for five minutes, Sylvia found that she was, as usual, out of cigarettes and cash. She nudged Raven, batted her eyes, and in a baby voice asked, “Girl, can Mama bum a smoke?”

  “Seriously?” Raven replied. “I’ve already given you so many.”

  “But massa!” Sylvia feigned fear and dropped to her knees on the cement. “Peeees! Me just want one smoke, massa!”

  “You are awful,” Raven laughed, rolling her eyes as she handed Sylvia a cigarette. They smiled together for a moment before Sylvia murmured under her breath, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” then proceeded to click and pop her way into the club.

  Raven’s smile turned into a sneer. “I can’t stand that bitch,” she hissed. “Why do you guys hang out with her?”

  Greg and I shrugged in
silence, but we both knew the answer. Sylvia could be insensitive, but her insensitivity was strangely inspired and wonderfully absurd. And for some reason, she liked Greg and me. Simply by not harassing us, she made us feel like special members of a very exclusive club.

  Sylvia was also a professional fag hag, a title she’d chosen for herself that was as offensive as the ones she applied to other people. At eighteen, Sylvia was not only an adult who could get into clubs, but she was also pretty much the queen of every gay bar in town. And soon she was going to get us into one of them.

  Walking up to the entrance of the Bonham Exchange, downtown San Antonio’s premier gay club, I felt butterflies in my stomach. Sylvia walked ahead of us, her voluminous breasts bouncing under countless layers of gauzy ebony fabric.

  “Thank God we’re out of that fuckin’ teen bar. I was about to catch a bad case of puberty up in that joint.” She looked over her shoulder and saw us, several feet behind her. “Why the fuck are y’all in the back of the goddamn bus, Rosa Parks? Let’s put some fucking hustle in it!”

  “Sylvia, we’re nervous,” Greg said. “What if they don’t believe the IDs you got?”

  “IDs? What the fuck is this ID business?”

  “Well, isn’t that how you’re getting us in?” I said.

  “David, listen to me.” She turned to us and placed her hands on our shoulders. “You are babies who are about to be men. I am going to make this possible, okay?”

  We nodded and smiled as Sylvia sweetly patted our faces. Suddenly and with painful intensity she pinched our cheeks and dragged us around the side of the club. “One! Do NOT question Mama! Two! Just FOLLOW Mama! Three! Do whatever Mama tells you to do!”

  “Ouch! That fucking hurt,” Greg whined as she released us in the alley behind the Bonham.

  “Why are we here?” I demanded, rubbing my burning cheek.