Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  These freaks were skinheads.

  Sylvia and Greg were nowhere to be seen. I could feel the piercing stares of every bald, steel-toed, suspender-wearing dude in the room. I was suddenly the correct answer in a very dangerous game of “one of these things is not like the other.” I felt like a Vegas showgirl in full regalia stranded deep inside Rikers Island. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I rushed back onto the porch. By the blue light of a crackling bug zapper I tried to de-fag myself as quickly as possible, shaking my hair out from its ponytail and rubbing makeup off my face. I unrolled my jeans to cover my Doc Marten boots while scanning the cigarette embers glowing in the backyard, hoping to see Greg or Sylvia attached to one of them. My hands trembled as I tried to light my Benson & Hedges Ultra Light 120, thinking, “Dammit! Why don’t I smoke butch-er cigarettes?”

  From the darkness came a spark and flicker. A flaming Zippo gracefully rose to my cigarette. I felt like Marlene Dietrich in a noir film.

  “I gotcha,” said the hulking Cro-Magnon with cropped brown hair towering over me. “I’m Max.” He popped the Zippo closed in a single swift motion. Max wore a white T-shirt with an Irish slogan on it. Tiny suspenders dangled from his pants, which were rolled up high around sixteen-hole Docs.

  “Uh, hi. I’m David,” I stuttered.

  “I’ve never seen you around here. Where do you live?”

  “Uh, San Antonio. I’m from there. You know, I was born there,” I continued, unable to stop speaking due to my nerves. “But we’re supposedly moving to Seguin.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s the town with the big nut.”

  “Yup. It’s the biggest pecan or some stupid shit like that,” I croaked, trying to sound ultrastraight while avoiding too much direct eye contact.

  “Your hair reminds me of someone,” Max said, squeezing the cigarette between his lips with his thumb and index finger.

  “Mine?” I raised my hands to my head, realizing that my scalp felt unusually sensitive. “Probably Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode. I get that a lot.”

  “Hmmm. I was thinking it looked more like that chick from Deee-Lite.”

  I paused, wondering if I should feel threatened. But as my skin began to tingle, I wasn’t offended at all. Perhaps it was the Vicks inhaler I’d eaten, but I found Max’s comparison hilarious. Once I began laughing, I couldn’t stop. And as Max laughed with me, he seemed transformed. He might have been laughing at me, but it didn’t matter, because suddenly he had dimples and chubby cheeks like a giant, overgrown baby.

  “You’re funny,” Max guffawed, handing me a warm beer.

  Over the next hour everyone came outside to say hi to him. Each partygoer gave me the once-over and looked to Max, who gave a straight-faced nod, as if to say, “This guy’s okay.” One by one, each skinheaded boy and Mohawked girl shook my trembling, clammy hand. I felt like I was holding court with Max, who was apparently the mayor of freaks in New Braunfels.

  As I started to Vick harder, I could feel my hair growing, and the wind on my neck. I couldn’t stop stretching.

  “Dude. Are you a yogi or something?” grinned Max as I reached down to touch my feet. “Who are you here with?”

  “Oh, they ditched me,” I said, sliding into downward-facing dog on some skinhead’s patio.

  “Fuck ’em, dude,” proclaimed Max, clinking his beer bottle against mine.

  “So, Max. You seem cool,” I said, raising my leg onto the deck railing like an extra from Fame. “But how can you be a skinhead?” The rush of Vicks in my bloodstream was making me a little cocky. “Aren’t they all fascists and racists?”

  “Dude. Hold up,” barked Max, slamming down his beer. “I’m not a bigot. I’m a SHARP.”

  I froze midstretch, confused by the term. “Huh?”

  “A SHARP: a skinhead against racial prejudice. We take the aesthetic of the enemy and subvert it,” he explained. “See, skins wear white laces for white power, but we wear multicolored laces for unity. Skins are straightedge, but we’ll smoke pot, drink beer, huff shit, whatever. Plus, skinheads are always looking for a fight. SHARPs only fight if provoked.”

  “So you’re like the hippies of punks or something?”

  “Ha-ha! Oh fuck, that’s funny. Sean!” he yelled over my shoulder. “My friend Dave just said SHARPs are like ‘the hippies of punks’!”

  Max popped open another beer and told me about the little town that might be my future home. “You know their football team is called the Seguin Matadors, right?”

  “Like a bullfighter?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled, taking a long drag off his cigarette. “But at away games, no one knows the little shithole. It gets mispronounced. So as they rush onto the field they get introduced like this.” Max made his wrists limp, and in a fey, high-pitched register, cheeped, “Welcome the Sequined Matadors!”

  That night, the two of us joked and drank for hours, talking about good music and news propaganda and racial intolerance and our single moms. Hanging out with Max felt like reuniting with someone I’d always known, someone familiar. I had a genuine feeling that Max was going to be a good friend.

  And then I had a different feeling: the kind you get when you’ve eaten a toxic chemical meant for topical use. The wind felt ice-cold. My muscles started convulsing. My scalp was covered in fire ants. I gripped my belly as the contents of my stomach came to a boil.

  “Are you okay, dude?” Max asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but instead of words, a projectile spray of vomit erupted from between my lips. I puked repeatedly off the side of the porch, hoping between each bout that it was almost over. Finally, as I wiped the last bit of vomit off my mouth, a glass of water appeared in front of me.

  “You okay, friend?”

  “Sorry,” I answered, totally ashamed. “I ate a Vicks inhaler on the way over.”

  “You ate . . . What?” he asked before roaring with laughter.

  Max laughed at me all the way to his house, where he lent me a clean, puke-less shirt with a leprechaun on it and allowed me to crash on his bedroom floor. I woke up the next morning around seven, still unsure what had happened to Greg and Sylvia. I dressed quietly and looked around at Max’s room, barely lit in the rising sun. The floor was littered with dirty clothes and a dozen pairs of boots. The walls were covered in posters for the Misfits, Bob Marley, and Operation Ivy. On a dresser by the door was a collection of framed photos: Max and his mom, Max with two girls, Max in a huddle of boys with cropped hair.

  I grabbed my keys and prepared to walk back to my car in Max’s oversize leprechaun shirt. As I crept into the hallway, a shaft of light filled the bedroom. Max was still asleep on his bed, curled up into a tiny ball. It seemed impossible that anyone as large as he’d seemed the night before could suddenly look so small.

  I left a note on his door before I left. “Thanks for everything. PS—If anyone ever offers you a Vick’s inhaler, DO NOT eat it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Barbar(ian)ism Begins at Home

  David, I’m so sorry I took off from that party,” explained Greg as we chain-smoked in his bedroom. “But those skinheads triggered a bunch of deep-seated trauma for me. I had to get out of there.”

  “But where have you been since then?” I asked. “No one’s seen you for two weeks. Your mom wouldn’t tell me on the phone. Raven heard you OD’d and Carla told me that you got sent to rehab!”

  “Rehab? I wish! But I do have big news,” he announced, leaping onto the bed and plopping down beside me. “So that night in New Braunfels, Sylvia called her hot friend Paul to come pick us up from a gas station. After Paul dropped off Sylvia at Bonham we made out in his backseat! He’s so hot and he’s super-old. Like, almost thirty!”

  “And then?” I asked, feeling jealous but still wanting to know more.

  “So the next morning my mom was being a total bitch and we started fighting. And in the heat of the moment, I screamed—” he paused for dramatic effect—“Mom . . . I’m GAY!”

  “
What? You came out to her?”

  “Yes! But I got so nervous about the whole ‘gay’ thing that I blurted out a bunch of other stuff to make it seem less scary. I said, ‘Mom! I’m also an alcoholic! And I’m addicted to acid! And I take allergy pills every day to get even more fucked up!’ David, I don’t even know if allergy pills do anything. I even told her I was becoming an anorexic, which is so dumb because I eat like, four bags of Funyons a day!”

  “And what happened?”

  Greg was trembling with excitement as he lit his cigarette. “So get this! My mom wants me away from bad influences for a little while. So I started doing a month of home school last week, which is like zero commitment,” he said, a long snake of smoke trailing from his mouth into his nostrils. “I also have to go to one Narcotics Anonymous meeting a day, where I have been meeting the hottest older guys you’ve ever seen. I made out with this thirty-four-year-old Mexican air force guy who’s trying to kick as addiction to prescription painkillers and . . . I think we’re in love!”

  My blood started to boil with that familiar mix of envy and arousal.

  “David! We need to talk,” he said, stamping out his cigarette. “Things haven’t gone that far with Jose, but they might. And when they do . . . I need to be prepared.” Greg reached under the bed, taking out a handful of condoms and a jar of pickles. “Listen, David. I know it’s weird, but we have to understand how this is going to work. If we’re going to be gay, we have to know how gay stuff works. If things go further with Jose I need to know what to do. And now that you’re maybe moving to Seguin . . .”

  “I’m not moving!”

  “Well, you say that now, but your mom is moving. What are you going to do?” he gasped. “I’m sure there aren’t any gay people in Seguin. So how will you learn?”

  “Maybe with a real person and not a hamburger topping!”

  “Listen to me! We are going to do this!” Greg countered sternly. “You’re going to take your pickle and rubber and stay here while I turn off the lights. I’m getting into my bed and getting under the covers. And we’re going to walk each other through this. Whatever happens, no matter what I say, DO NOT come over to my bed, okay?”

  “But isn’t this dangerous?” I asked, taking a slimy pickle from the jar.

  “What’s dangerous?” Greg snapped. “Never getting laid? Ending up some old virgin living in a trailer park with a bunch of pornos? It’s time to be a man, David!” he barked, like a personal trainer at an elliptical machine. “Now put the condom on the pickle before I turn off the light!”

  I looked down at my soggy dill, annoyed that I was going to experience intercourse via vegetable while ten feet away from the guy whose pickle I actually wanted.

  “Three seconds!” Greg warned.

  I fumbled with my condom, dropping the pickle on the bed.

  “Three . . .”

  “Greg, I’m trying. It’s just so . . .”

  “Two . . .”

  “ . . . Slimy.”

  “One.”

  The light went out just as I slipped the condom over my pickle. Across the room I heard the click of a button. “I thought I’d play some music to get you in the mood,” Greg said as the sound of Madonna’s “Justify My Love” filled the room.

  “Nothing can get me in the mood for this!” I replied, the pungent odor of vinegar and Trojan lubricant smacking my olfactories in a decidedly unsexy way.

  “Ooh!” Greg exhaled. “I got the tip!”

  “What?” I asked, shocked. “You already got a condom on it and put it inside you?”

  “I’m a pro with condoms, David,” he barked, “because I PRACTICE!”

  “My rubber smells like old seafood.”

  “Woo!” Greg exploded with a giggle. “It’s so cold!!!”

  “You could’ve warmed them up first!”

  “Stop complaining! Do you really want a warm limp pickle in your butt?”

  “I don’t want a cold hard pickle in my butt, Greg! I can’t do this.”

  “Just surrender to the fantasy, David. I’m pretending mine is Marky Mark.”

  “I’m pretending mine is NOT a pickle!” I said, fumbling with the slippery thing beneath the sheets. “Don’t you have a gherkin or cornichon something I could start with?”

  “Shut up, David!” Greg snapped. “The only other pickles we have are those bread-and-butter ones!”

  “Well, I’m not about to shove a handful of sliced pickles in my ass!”

  “Then shut up and use your dill!” he snipped.

  “But Greg, if the condom breaks it’ll sting so bad!”

  I tried to muster the courage to fuck myself with the pickle, trying to imagine it was Greg. But even with him groaning in the darkness, I couldn’t get myself turned on. I tossed the pickle beside me, deciding it was all too weird.

  “Oooh, yes,” I feigned, trying to sound authentically turned on.

  “See, David?”

  “Ahhh,” I moaned again, playing along so that we could experience this “first” together. I moaned and panted in the darkness for fifteen minutes, faking my first, and hopefully last, orgasm with a perishable food.

  The next morning was awkward as Greg and I got ready for school. It was almost like we’d had sex with each other. Hair gel and safety pins were passed in low, hushed voices. Direct eye contact was avoided. In Greg’s car we barely spoke, allowing “Just Can’t Get Enough” to drown out the discomfort between us. Greg lit a joint and passed it to me. At the red light at the entrance to our school’s parking lot, I accidentally dropped it on the floorboard, sending Greg into a maniacal frenzy.

  “What the fuck?” he screamed, leaning over my lap to retrieve it. “My car!”

  I took a certain pleasure in watching him sweat it. He was always so together, so cool. After pounding the floorboard with his hand for a few seconds he went to sit back down, accidentally jabbing his hip with the emergency brake.

  “Ouch! I almost sat on that.”

  “Well,” I grinned, “at least it’s not a pickle.”

  Greg’s head turned slowly to face me like an oscillating fan on low speed. We glared into each other’s eyes for what felt like an eternity until the corners of our cotton-dry mouths began to twitch. We laughed until we collapsed against each other, coughing and choking on a thick mist of marijuana smoke. We didn’t realize that the light had changed until all the cars behind us started honking. Preppy kids in Jeeps yelled and honked on either side as they passed us. A cowboy in a pickup with a big Texas flag in the window gave us the bird.

  “Move, you fucking faggots!”

  We skipped first period in the school parking lot, hotboxing the car and screaming “Just Can’t Get Enough” until we could barely breathe. We spent lunch beneath our tree with our friends, exchanging knowing looks and breaking into constant laughter over the previous night’s escapades.

  “What the fuck are you cracking up about?” Jake asked us as Raven rubbed his feet.

  “Yeah, you’ve been giddy little bitches all morning,” added Carla.

  “Oh, nothing,” Greg answered her, grinning at me with bloodshot eyes.

  That night my dad called me from the road. I pleaded my case, knowing I had only one option if I wanted to stay in San Antonio.

  “Look Dad, I know you work on the road and keeping a place here would be unnecessary but I’m doing great in San Antonio and moving me away from school this close to graduation could really hurt my GPA and negatively affect my chances of getting into a well-respected college of my choosing. So—”

  “David,” my dad interrupted. “Wait a minute. Slow down. Are you saying you want me to get a place there with you?”

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “Well, it would be nice to have a home base instead of just keeping all my stuff in storage. But I’d only be home for a few days every couple weeks. We’d have to get you a bank account that I could deposit money in for your groceries and things. I hope that would be okay for you. I’d hate for yo
u to be lonely.”

  Fireworks were exploding in my brain. I tried to camouflage my excitement about this prospect, and in a mature, carefully measured voice, I replied.

  “Dad, I think I would be okay with that.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Left to My Own Devices

  Greg, Sylvia, and her friend Ray-Ray had decided to take hits of acid and ecstasy at the same time, or “candy-flip.” At midnight we broke into the grounds of the McNay Art Museum, a beautiful compound full of landscaped gardens, vine-covered gazebos, and small ponds full of giant goldfish. We did this on a dare from Sylvia, whose drug-addled challenges were getting increasingly dangerous.

  A week earlier she’d dared me to drop acid in a hospital ER, where we sat for an hour watching bloodied, crippled people come and go. We must have looked out of place: Sylvia with her flame-orange bob in a deep-necked gown, her lace-covered boobs pressed up to her chin; me with a gelled-up Mohawk, amethyst bolo tie, and penciled-in eyebrows. At 3 a.m. I reached my breaking point when an unconscious man in a neck brace with a bloody eye socket was wheeled in. I ran through the hospital parking lot to my car, where Sylvia held me in the backseat as I sobbed against her heaving bosom.

  “Oh God. Sylvia! I’m going to die. You’re going to die!”

  “Shhh, Minerva,” she calmed in her morose way. “We’re already dead.”

  My weeping jag lasted for an hour. But Sylvia was there, like she always was, to help me through the psychotic break she herself had triggered. She was like a morose Pied Piper, leading anyone who got to know her on a series of harrowing field trips to experience troubling things. Sylvia was loud and campy, but she also kept dried roses pressed in the pages of her Anne Rice novels. In the last year she’d captured and found homes for no fewer than five black cats. On two separate occasions I’d walked in on her crying by candlelight while reading Percy Bysshe Shelley.

  Tonight, in the museum garden, she was sketching plants in her journal as Greg bounded back and forth across a babbling brook in nothing but his underwear.