Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  Sylvia raised her small clutch and lightly smacked my head with each word of her command. “Do! Not! Question! Mama!”

  The light over us flickered as she caught her breath and fixed her hair, which had been dyed an almost iridescent violet. Greg, trying to calm her, said, “Sylvia, your hair is such a nice purple color.”

  “Bitch! It’s called EGGPLANT!” she screamed. Taking a deep yoga breath, she straightened her teardrop-shaped brooch. “Now, just stay here by this fence and you will be in this club in five minutes. Capisce?”

  We nodded in silence, muttering a quiet “Thank you” as she clicked away.

  An hour later, we were still waiting by the tall wooden fence. The alley was somehow darker, and distant sirens had been sounding closer and closer.

  “It’s getting late, huh?” Greg was pacing up and down the alley.

  “What if this is a prank?” I asked.

  “I know she’s a little bit crazy, but why would she do that? I mean . . .” He stopped as we heard a slight scratching.

  “A rat!” Greg winced and fell against the chain-link fence on the other side of the alley.

  “Pssst. Bitches!” a voice whispered. “Are you there?”

  “Sylvia?” Greg asked.

  “No. It’s Anne Frank, fagotron!”

  As I snickered, Greg backhanded me in the chest and replied, “What do you want us to do?”

  Suddenly the two-by-fours of the fence busted out with brute force. A small four-inch heel kicked the planks from side to side as they swung back and forth, still nailed to the top of the fence. Sylvia’s tiny face peeked out from between them and flashed us a bloodred Joker grin.

  “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”

  We crawled through the narrow space in the fence and snuck through the patio. Inside the club, Sylvia kept reminding us to keep our cool. “Close your mouths, whores. You trying to catch flies?”

  But it was amazing. The Bonham Exchange wasn’t any old dance club. It was a palatial converted synagogue, complete with a three-story vaulted ceiling over the dance floor and four full bars. Muscular men in tiny thongs gyrated on boxes to thump-heavy music. The Bonham’s speakers and laser lights made FX seem like a school dance.

  “Look, David. Everyone’s drinking out of real glasses!” Greg exclaimed.

  “Isn’t it fancy, ladies?” grinned Sylvia. “Welcome to the Bottom Sexchange! Now let’s go.”

  “Wait! Why are we leaving?” Greg begged as Sylvia pulled us away from a hairless Mexican guy who was thrusting his banana thong in our faces.

  “It’s last call, Gregorian Chant! Come on, Crabapple!”

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was already 2 a.m. I hadn’t realized how long we’d been waiting in that alley.

  “Don’t worry, girls! Night’s not over yet. We’re going to an after-party!”

  Thirty minutes later we pulled into the Elmira Inn, a shady downtown hotel. Even if you never went downtown, you knew about the Elmira from its appearances on the ten o’clock news. It was where prostitutes got busted and drug deals went wrong. Greg and I were genuinely thrilled to be there.

  “Oh, wow! This is the place where those drag queens started that fire!” Greg chirped as he parked the car. “I’ve always wanted to see it!”

  “Well, you’re about to, Mary,” said Sylvia in a half-welcome/half-warning. She dug through her clutch and pulled out a small glass vial. “Here. Sniff a little of this before we go in.”

  “What is it?” I asked as she took off the lid and inhaled the stuff.

  “Oh, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud, Minerva!” she replied, her eyes rolling back in her head as she slumped into her seat.

  “Yeah, Minerva,” chided Greg as he took a snort, clearly confused about who “Minerva” was. “Oh, wow,” he said, leaning back. “My head is so warm . . .”

  I took the vial from Greg and snorted, my head filling with a thick, hot jelly that slipped down my neck all the way to my tailbone. “Oh, fuck. It feels amazing.” I could only imagine what high-end, designer drug I’d just taken. “Sylvia, what is this?”

  Her eyes rolled down from her skull like venetian blinds. “It’s VCR head cleaner.”

  “What? You mean I just inhaled—”

  “Let’s go, cunts!” And, like that, she was on her feet and up the stairs. On the second floor, we walked into a smoke-filled lair of thudding club music and pungent male musk. My brain was buzzing with a pulsing crackle, like the staccato hum of an old television right after you turn it off. Dizzy, I grabbed Sylvia’s arm. “I feel . . . spinny.”

  “I know, bitch. It’s called the wah-wahs. Isn’t it fabulous?”

  I tried to focus my eyes through the smoke in the dimly lit room. The door to the next suite was open, as was the one after that, and the one after that. Dozens of people, mostly men, filled the space as far down as the eye could see, like an endless mirror reflecting itself, forever and into eternity. I realized that Greg was gone and suddenly became aware of the immediate space around me. I looked down to see two men rolling around on the carpet in their underwear.

  Are they fighting? Or . . . Oh wait . . . They’re not fighting.

  To my right, a girl with fluttering eyelids was grinding her shoulder blades into an air-conditioning unit.

  It’s not that hot in here. Does she feel sick? Oh wait . . . She feels just fine.

  I felt a smack on my arm and turned to find Greg beside me with a plastic cup.

  “Hey, I made you a rum and Coke, but there’s no Coke. So it’s just rum and ice.”

  I downed the glass and noticed that Greg was now only wearing a tight white tank top.

  “What happened to your Psychedelic Furs shirt?”

  “I felt overdressed,” he said as a skinny boy in red underwear stumbled past us.

  “Where’s Sylvia?”

  “How should I know?” Greg could barely focus on me. “Oh my God, that guy is totally checking us out.”

  I tried to aim my vision on one point in the spinning room, but everyone seemed to have a twin. “Which one? The little blond guy on the bed?”

  “No. That forty-year-old in the red tank top drinking Zima. You should go talk to him.”

  “No, Greg. I feel weird. I don’t want to.”

  “Of course you don’t want to. I have to do everything.” Greg handed me his drink and coiffed his hair. “How do I look? How’s the light? My skin?” Greg angled his face in several directions. “Am I shiny? What about here? Am I shiny like this? Okay. Give me back my drink.”

  Greg confidently strode up to the man and introduced himself. “Hey, I’m Greg.”

  “Hey, I’m Paul,” he replied, slipping his thumbs into the front of his low-slung jeans. “How old are you, Greg?”

  “How old do you think I am?” Greg flipped his bangs and gave Paul a smoldering stare. Paul leaned forward and whispered something in Greg’s ear. Greg laughed coyly and slipped his thin red straw between his lips seductively. “You’re funny.”

  How the hell does he do that? I thought, followed immediately by, I need to find a bathroom now.

  I stumbled through the connected suites, trying to find an unlocked bathroom, as strange men looked at me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced before. Are they angry? I thought. Why do they all want to fight me? As a mustached man in a bandanna palmed my bottom, I realized that these men didn’t want to fight at all.

  I wanted to be like Greg, to turn to this man confidently and simply say, “Hello.” But I couldn’t even hold his stare. It shouldn’t have been so hard for me to look into the eyes of another man, if only to say, “Hi. I’m David.”

  “David!” I spun around to see Sylvia sitting at a small table with a few men. “Crabapple! Come to Mama!”

  A half hour later I was even more obliterated, curled up beneath the table against Sylvia’s leg. I started to nod off as she entertained a gaggle of adoring gay fans, one of whom offered her a small bag of cocaine.

  “Come on, stick-in-t
he-mud,” she whispered to me. “A hit of this will keep you up.”

  “No, Sylvia. My head feels like a brick. I don’t feel well.”

  “Suit yourself, pussy. More for Mama.” I heard her snort a giant line as an old, haggard woman entered the room. She shuffled toward us in flip-flops, wearing a dirty denim skirt that revealed bruised knees. Her short auburn hair was arranged atop her head in an unnecessary banana clip. Her entrance stirred the masses, and as she sat, a hush fell over the room.

  “If y’all don’t know me, my name is Leona,” she announced with a gravelly rasp. “And when Leona gets to the party, that’s when the party starts!” Leona erupted into a fit of coughing and removed a small glass pipe from her bag. “Who wants to hit it first?”

  “Excuse me, ma’am. He does!” Sylvia grabbed the pipe and passed it down to me. “Here, Minerva.”

  “No, Sylvia. My head . . .”

  “Oh, come on! It’s just weed.”

  “But I feel so sick and . . .”

  “Come on, Crabby. Don’t make Mama get high alone.”

  Sylvia looked at me with the big, wet eyes of a pleading child. Leona stared at me sleepily, a thousand wrinkles at either edge of her permanently down-turned mouth. As the song on the stereo faded to silence, the eyes of every man in the room were on me. All their stares felt like a dare, compounded by Sylvia’s insistence. I unfurled from my tiny fetal ball in an attempt to rise to the occasion. I would not be shamed by all these strangers with eyes I could barely look into, all these men to whom I could not simply say, “Hello. I’m David.”

  The first odd thing I noticed was the crackling sound the pipe made as I lit it, like someone ate a bunch of Pop Rocks and opened their mouth to my ear. Then my head felt like it was in a microwave, severed on a dish while slowly spinning in waves of radiation.

  I collapsed under the table onto all fours as my throat closed. My eyes watered as I tried harder to move air past the prickly blowfish that was expanding in my neck. The lights in my head were starting to go out. I reached up from under the table as tears streaked down my face.

  “Sylvia . . . Help.”

  She looked at me with blank, tired, pink-hued eyes, eyes that said, “I’m sorry. Have we met?” Slowly, a smile spread across her face as one of her eyes went a little googly, like the wandering, displaced eyeball of a broken doll. She let out a slow wheeze of a laugh, like air escaping from a slit tire.

  “Bitch, you just smoked CRACK!”

  The room erupted in laughter around me. As quickly as I’d thought I was going to black out, I felt an urgent rush of electricity course through me. My entire nervous system was on fire and my eyes felt like they were being pulled open by tiny, invisible wires. In the midst of the laughter, I slowly raised my head up. Beneath the table across from me were Leona’s legs. As my vision cleared and my brain began to process at lightning speed, I found myself looking up Leona’s dirty acid-washed denim skirt. There they were: her withered, pendulous penis and testicles bouncing in time with her deep, cacophonous laughter.

  The door across the room opened and Greg entered with the older guy in the red shirt. As he tucked in his tank-top, Greg scanned the scene before him.

  “What happened?”

  I was pretty sure at that moment that Greg had enjoyed a better night at the party than I had.

  Between Greg’s skin tips and Sylvia’s eyebrow tweezing, I had a lot of look going on. Here I am posing with Greg, whose insane shoulder pads made him look like a power lesbian from the cast of L.A. Law. I wish Greg would’ve confronted me about my paisley button-down over the turtleneck t-shirt, but my pout almost makes up for it.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER 17

  Boys Don’t Cry

  Honey, we’re getting married! Mike is going to be your stepfather!”

  Mike smiled at me across the restaurant table with tears in his eyes, presumably a symptom of that day’s high pollen count.

  “David, I want you to know that I love your mother very much. I think I can make you both very happy. I promise.” Mike’s desperate insistence made me feel like I was buying a car. My mom shifted uncomfortably and shot him a look as he continued. “I just want you to know that Seguin is a great little town.”

  And then I got it. The desperation, the sales pitch, my mother’s forced grin as she twisted her dinner napkin into a little paper rope.

  “We’re moving to Seguin?” I asked.

  “Honey, listen to your mother,” she begged. “Mike has a great job and a house in Seguin. His kids are near their grandparents and they’re really settled there.”

  “Well, I’m really settled here!” I snapped.

  “David, we won’t be moving until your school break! That’s something, right?” My mother reached out and took my hand. “It’s going to be great, and— What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “This thing on your arm here,” she said, touching my happy-face scar.

  “It’s nothing!” I said, pulling my arm away. “I’m happy for you both. I just . . .” My mother stared at me hopefully, like she was waiting for my blessing. “Of course I’m happy,” I lied. “I’m sure Seguin will be great!”

  “I am not moving to Seguin,” I declared, banging my fist on the steering wheel as Sylvia handed a joint to Greg in the backseat.

  “Don’t let them tell you what to do!” wheezed Greg.

  “Emancipation, bitch!” screamed Sylvia. “Be your own man, girl!”

  The three of us were driving half an hour outside of San Antonio to a town called New Braunfels, inexplicably pronounced “New Braunsfel” by those who lived there.

  “Why do those hicks relocate their S’s?” asked Sylvia, her glazed eyes half-closed.

  “You’re the one who wanted to come out here,” sighed Greg, perturbed that we were headed to the country instead of sneaking into the Bonham Exchange.

  “Come on, bitches,” Sylvia moaned, teasing her freshly-dyed blood-red hair in the visor mirror. “Once you see fine-ass Tommy you’ll understand. He’s got a Mohawk and did time for graffiti,” she squealed dreamily.

  I’d agreed to go as long as she paid for the gas and cigarettes. But halfway there, with an empty tank and no smokes, Sylvia realized something.

  “Oh, sorry, Minerva. I forgot my wallet at home.”

  “You’d forget your pussy at home if it wasn’t attached to your crotch,” Greg said, starting his and Sylvia’s weekly cussing match.

  “Look, Gregorian Chant, do you really want to start with me?”

  “You forget your wallet a lot for someone who doesn’t seem that stupid.”

  “Whatever, cunt. Love your hair. Hope it wins.”

  “Okay, Sylvia. At least my hair is tinted less than thirty colors.”

  “Bitch, what you got ain’t a tint. What you got is a frost!”

  “Ah!” Greg’s nostrils flared in offense. Sylvia had crossed a line. It was time to intervene.

  “Guys, just stop fighting, okay? I’ve got enough for gas and smokes, all right?”

  “David! Don’t be a pushover,” Greg said, punching my shoulder from the backseat.

  “Thanks, Crabb,” said Sylvia, snuggling her painted face against my arm. “Don’t be mad, Miss Thing.”

  A few minutes later I reached into the Walgreens drugstore bag in my lap and removed a small white plastic Vicks inhaler. With scissors from her purse, Sylvia cut through the rough, tubelike casing and removed the fibrous, cylindrical, menthol-soaked core, which looked like a cigarette filter with the paper stripped off. She cut it into three pieces and handed one to each of us.

  “So what did Joey tell us to do with these?”

  “I think he said you just wash it down with a drink,” she calmly answered.

  I stared at her blankly.

  “What?” she asked. “He said it’s like cheap ecstasy. You just take it like a pill. It’s called . . .” She looked down at the package in her hand. “Vicking?”

  “Uh,
that doesn’t seem right, Sylvia.”

  “Oh my God, David. Are you afraid to fucking eat a Vicks inhaler?” dared Greg, thus beginning his and Sylvia’s weekly “make-fun-of-David” session, their version of make-up sex.

  “Davey is afraid of getting too fucked up,” scolded Sylvia, twisting her fists in front of her eyes like a baby.

  “Ha-ha. You are such a bitch, Sylvia,” said Greg.

  “My name is David and I—” Sylvia jumped, as if surprised by something. “Oh, that’s just my own shadow!”

  Greg kicked the back of my seat in hysterics. “Girl, you are throwing some shade!”

  “Come on, Mary! Take the goddamn thing.”

  “Seriously, David.”

  “Just swallow it, Stick-in-the-mud.”

  “Come on, dude.”

  “Do it, Minerva!”

  Their imploring became too intense.

  “SHUT UP!” I interrupted, popping the fuzzy little cylinder into my mouth and swallowing.

  “Ha-ha! You’re fucking insane,” cackled Greg, throwing his Vicks chunk at Sylvia and falling over in the backseat. “You actually ate it!”

  Sylvia threw her Vicks out the window and squealed with laughter. “You are crazy, Crabb!” she cackled, trying to catch her breath. “I can’t . . . believe . . . you ate it . . .”

  As my stomach emitted an ominous growl, I braced myself for what was coming.

  A few minutes later we pulled up to a shabby mobile home with several smaller trailers attached to its sides and roof, like a white-trash M. C. Escher painting. After I applied some powder, fixed my ponytail, and straightened my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt, we headed to the front door. I could hear thrashing music inside as we walked onto the porch, which was littered with cigarette butts, beer bottles, and a waterlogged recliner. In the dimly lit living room were about thirty people, although the bed in the center made me think it might not be the living room after all. Some skinny, hairless boys looked at me from a dark corner as I neared the wood-paneled kitchen bar. Glass broke behind me after an enormous guy in a puffy jacket threw a beer bottle against the wall. As two boys in tank tops started to punch each other, I realized that these people, although freaks, were not my kind of freaks.