Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  “No. He wouldn’t understand,” I said.

  Why did I just say that? Shut up, David. Shut up.

  Brownie squinted, like my answer had confused him. “He . . . wouldn’t?”

  This second question was a golden opportunity to explain that I’d just misheard him. I could say I was simply too high on LSD and Freon to have accurately represented how very heterosexual I was. I could fix it. But again I said, “No. He wouldn’t understand.”

  I couldn’t tell if I was really high or suddenly stone-cold sober, but there were tears in my eyes. As much as I’d felt accepted during the last year, this admission to my father made what I’d thought I’d come to terms with real. Everything was about to change. I started wishing myself out of the room, wishing myself somewhere else—not with Greg or Sylvia or Raven but somewhere alone, hermetically sealed in a vacuum, untouchable. My father looked into my eyes, not with anger or sadness but blankly, like he’d just been punched in the solar plexus and was stuck in that moment right before the pain hits.

  In the car on the way home, a new mantra kept repeating in a horrible loop.

  My dad knows I’m gay. My dad knows I’m gay. My dad knows I’m gay.

  It’s humiliating enough being outed to your father by your guidance counselor. But it’s especially emasculating when his name is Brownie. I’d hardly noticed him at school before, but now he found me in the halls two or three times a day to pat me on the back and ask me how my father and I were doing. He was trying to be kind. But all I saw was the man who’d ruined my father’s happiness forever.

  My dad took time off work so that we were together every morning and night. I’d even heard him creep into my room at 3 a.m., presumably to make sure I hadn’t shimmied out the window of our third-floor apartment. I was gay. I wasn’t Spider-Man.

  After a week of awkward, nerve-racking meals together, I hoped things were improving with my dad. I’d been attending all my classes and had hardly seen my friends. One night, we sat over our plates eating steaks and watching Wheel of Fortune. My mouth full of squash, I said, “Do you think Vanna White ever has alphabet nightmares? Like being devoured by vowels and stuff like that?”

  My dad laughed hard for a few seconds, looking at me with an expression I’d missed. But all at once, the warmth vanished, as if he’d realized that laughter was something he couldn’t offer me anymore. His warm chuckling was suddenly replaced by an intensified scraping of fork against knife. He stared at me with the saddest eyes and asked, “You know what they do, right?”

  “What?” I had an idea what he meant, but I was hoping I was wrong.

  “Homosexuals. You know what they do, don’t you?” he asked again before returning to eating his steak.

  After dinner I locked myself in my room, attempting to call my lost and missing friends. Outside, I could hear cabinets slamming and angrily washed glasses ringing against one another. I tore open Behaviour, the new Pet Shop Boys CD that Hector had given me, and popped it into the stereo. The first song “Being Boring” began quietly with the sound of a digital flute and gentle wah-wah guitar licks. I turned the track up louder, hoping to tune out my father and transport myself anywhere but that tiny, lonely bedroom. The lyrics tell the story of a man’s life from boyhood to middle age, the first few verses detailing “invitations to teenage parties” and the tentative thrill of leaving home. The first half of the song mirrored exactly how I felt in that moment; ecstatically impatient for the future, but frightened about the loss my freedom might bring about. I played the song again and again, each spin holding me like an invisible blanket in my bed.

  Half an hour later, there was a knock on my door. My dad walked in carefully, the way you would around an untamed animal. He pulled up a chair across from me and sat down, pulling something from his back pocket. “I want to show you something,” he said, revealing the August 1987 issue of Penthouse magazine. For a moment I was happy. Rolando! I thought, happy to see my long-lost G-stringed Latin or Italian or Greek lover.

  “David. I want to ask you, and there’s no wrong answer here. Well, there is a wrong . . . Um . . .” My father hesitated, searching for the right words. “Anyway . . . I want to ask you . . . Who are you more attracted to? Her . . .” he said, pointing with a grin to Candy and her satellite-dish areolas, “ . . . or him?”

  This was different. Answering this question wasn’t like committing to a simple label. This was saying to my father that I wanted to do what “they do” with “that guy”—the ripped, tan one with the broad shoulders and the sweaty bulge in his thong.

  I took my time answering the question, hemming and hawing in hopes that a ringing phone or knock at the door would keep me from having to tell my father the truth. But eventually, the silence became more unnerving than the possibility of admitting the truth.

  “Him,” I said quickly, like I was ripping off a Band-Aid.

  In the stillness that followed, I thought that this was about to be the moment my dad stopped loving me or called me a name he wouldn’t be able to take back. I braced myself, afraid that this would be the instant I stopped having a father. Leonard stood up slowly from the chair and rolled up his magazine. I waited for his response, knowing that his sprinkler system of rage was about to be firmly aimed at me and no one else.

  “Well, son,” he blurted with forced excitement, “tomorrow we’re having fajitas for dinner!” Then, before I had time to reply or process his response, he spun on his heels and left.

  I spent the next several weeks coming out to my father over and over again. It was like a gay Groundhog Day. He’d point out a pretty woman at the mall. I’d agree, and then he’d ask me how I could know if I was really gay.

  “Dad! I’m gay, not dead!”

  I would mention that I found Freddie Mercury weird-looking and my dad would smile, as if finding a gay person unattractive somehow made me straight. Regardless of how many times I said it, it always seemed like the first to my dad, who would look at me with sad, confused eyes and then go silent.

  After a few weeks, my dad decided to go back on the road full-time. I’d be moving in with my mom and Mike in Seguin. I didn’t put up a fight. How could I? He’d rearranged his life and spent thousands of dollars to support his secretly gay, school-skipping, drug-addled son. A part of me was almost relieved to get away from the tension, even if it was to Seguin.

  On our last night in the apartment I was packing up a box of journals and sketchpads when I found an old greeting card. My father had sent it to me when I was little and away at summer camp. On the front was a drawing of a big, orange lion with a little, smiling cub at his side. Inside, my father had asked how my summer was going and if I was making new friends. At the end, he wrote something that he said to me a lot when I was little: that the reason he loved me wasn’t just that he was my father. He loved me because I was a “neat person,” and he thought that even if he wasn’t my father, I was someone he would want to know.

  I took the card across the hall, where my father was packing up his things. I crept into his room carefully, the way he’d crept into mine three weeks earlier. He wasn’t so much an untamed animal as a zombie, shuffling from closet to dresser to bed, unaware of his conniving son’s presence in the room.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, DJ?”

  “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he said into his suitcase.

  “Why do you love me, though?”

  He paused, wearily looking up from a pile of two suitcases’ worth of clothing he was trying to cram into one. “What do you mean?”

  “Just tell me why you love me,” I asked again.

  He sighed and tossed down a ball of socks. “I love you because you’re my son,” he answered, looking at me blankly for a moment before returning to his packing.

  Later this night, lying in my bed with my headphones on, I stared at that old, wrinkled greeting card. I read and reread it for half an hour, unsure whether it belonged in the box of things I’d b
e taking to my new life or in the garbage.

  CHAPTER 22

  A New Life

  A lot changed after Brownie-gate. I hadn’t been the only one called into the school office that day. It had been a shakedown. One by one we’d fallen like dominoes when confronted with our forged letters, admitting to a myriad of bad behavior. A few of our friends got sent to alternative school. Some were forced to go to rehab. Others just disappeared.

  It was a sad time made sadder by my leaving, and we all couldn’t have been happier to feel so sad about it. If you ever want to see goth kids step up to the plate and own their brand, just give them a reason to say good-bye. My last week of school was a black celebration of morbidity, as evidenced by my growing collection of dark poetry, sad mixtapes, and moody charcoal sketches. Greg performed a suicide-themed dance for me at school, choreographed to Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumors.” In it, he bounded across the small black-box theater in a black cloak with a red silk scarf, which he used to simulate sprays of blood and swinging nooses. It was disturbing and baroque, and one of the gayest things I’d ever seen. It was also the most amazing gift anyone had ever given me.

  After class we all reminisced in the grocery-store parking lot next to school, chain-smoking and drinking whiskey from Jake’s flask. I had to be in Seguin by 6 p.m. for dinner. So at five o’clock I started saying good-bye, which takes forever when goth teenagers are involved.

  “David,” said Greg, “let’s hotbox in the car real quick.”

  Greg and I jumped in his little Cabriolet and rolled up the windows, letting it fill up with pot smoke. “Oh L’Amour” played on the stereo, reminding me of all those road trips we’d taken together when so much was still unspoken. The car looked different now than it had a year ago. The dashboard, like the bumpers, was matted with Cure and Bauhaus stickers. Every few feet of the interior was marked with a cigarette burn or a splash of dried nail polish.

  “I’m gonna miss you so much,” said Greg. I would only be an hour away, but we both knew things were about to change.

  “I don’t think my mother’s going to let me do anything for a while. She says I can’t leave Seguin at all until the end of summer.”

  “I know. I think my mom’s clamping down too,” said Greg, taking a deep puff on the joint. “Fucking Brownie.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Fucking Brownie.”

  “Hey,” said Greg, taking a toke. “Come here.”

  Greg leaned toward me, his hand reaching up around the back of my head. He closed his eyes as his lips parted to meet mine. I leaned in to him, letting my lungs fill up with the smoke he was releasing into my body. And then we kissed. I wrapped my fingers around the jagged crook of his jawline, feeling a bit of stubble along his sideburn with my thumb. Greg’s hand slipped around my waist to pull me closer. And then, as I released him from my grip . . . I felt nothing.

  We looked quizzically at each other, knowing that what had just happened was somehow inevitable. It should have been a mind-blowing kiss, at least for me. Yet after all that sexual tension and endless waiting, it was pretty anticlimactic. As Greg turned up the stereo and lit two cigarettes, it was clear that neither of us felt much of anything special.

  Greg handed me a cigarette and smiled. “I love you, David.”

  In a way I couldn’t put my finger on, I was never so sure that Greg was my best friend. “I love you too.”

  “Did you give him the present?” yelled Raven, hopping into the back seat.

  “Oh yeah! We got you this.” Greg slipped me a small, tinfoil-wrapped square.

  “It’s white blotter. Good shit,” added Raven, planting a bloodred kiss on my cheek. “For when Seguin starts to kill you.”

  I drove away at 5:45, knowing I’d be late but not really caring. In the rearview mirror I watched my friends load into Greg’s car and thought about what their plans were for the weekend. I hadn’t asked and didn’t want to know. And although it hurt my heart a bit, it made me happy to think they’d probably have a great time without me.

  An hour later, I pulled up to our quaint little house on the outskirts of town and lit a cigarette. I sat in my car and glared at the place, with its flower-filled window boxes, twenty-foot clothesline, and gravel driveway. On one side of the house was a field of dairy cattle; on the other, a Primitive Baptist cemetery. These were my new neighbors: bulge-eyed cows and baby corpses from the late 1800s. Five minutes later I finally willed myself to go inside.

  “You’re grounded!” snapped my mom, removing baked beans from the oven.

  “What? I was in the driveway a few minutes ago!”

  “You’re late, mister,” said Mike casually, strolling into the kitchen. “We have rules here. Rules that start now.”

  “But it was my last day and I was saying good-bye.”

  “Sorry, buddy. That’s the way it goes,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Mom?” I whined.

  “Honey, this is your first day here and you couldn’t even get home on time!”

  “But my friends—”

  “The school only agreed to pass you because they knew you were leaving,” she said. “It’s a miracle you even passed your last exams!”

  “But Mom—”

  “Your history teacher didn’t even know who you were!”

  “But she only started a month ago—”

  “David!” She shushed me. “Your mother loves you and accepts your new gay identity, but . . .”

  “Oh God, Mom. Stop with that!”

  “Well, would you rather me be like your father?” she bellowed, slamming a pepper mill down on the counter. “I’m going to respect you and you’re going to respect ME!”

  My mother had never yelled like that before. I looked at her in her denim apron covered with little drawings of cows and chickens, standing over a boiling pot as her stepchildren set the table for dinner. This was who she was now: a homemaker with a husband and family. And I was an outsider who had never asked to be a part of it.

  I stormed into my room: a large, carpeted, windowless cell in the center of the house. Mike had offered me other bedroom options, but I’d angrily insisted on that one.

  “Who needs fucking windows anyway?” I’d said, hoping he’d see how miserable I was going to be. Mike, pulling out all the stops to ease my transition, agreed to redecorate the room any way I wanted. In a move that was both goth and gay, I demanded gray walls and track lighting. My furniture was made from cinder blocks I’d salvaged from Mike’s work shed. My elbows and shins were already covered in nicks and scrapes from a week of accidental run-ins with my desk and shelving. I had designed a pretty mournful place for myself. A dark, windowless room full of sandpaper furniture lit by harsh spotlights did not make for a peaceful place of solitude.

  Being in the center of the house meant sharing a wall with almost every room. I could hear it all: my mother humming in the kitchen, my stepsister singing along to the radio, and my brother playing video games. My new brother and sister were truly foreign creatures, their day-to-day lives full of banalities. I hadn’t been around twelve-year-olds since I’d been a twelve-year-old. One day, after listening to constant scraping from Mickey’s room, I went next door and found him hacking at a two-by-four with a pocketknife.

  “Mickey, what are you doing?”

  He looked up at me and shrugged as a cow from next door appeared in the window and let out a long, mournful “mooooo.” Is that what this place will do to me? I thought. How long until I’m sitting in silence alone on the floor of my room hacking at wood with a knife? I sat in my gray room full of random noise and wrote these fears in a journal I named Claude, the only friend I had. My bedroom wasn’t a place to sleep. It was a place to stew.

  After two boring weeks in my cave, I had to get out of the house. I decided to drive down Highway 123 into Seguin, the actual town. Seguin proper was all very beige. And wooden. And concrete. Two facing strip malls seemed to house every business that anyone in town would ever dream of vis
iting, including Walmart. I smoked a bit of my last bag of weed and went inside the superstore. Surrounding me were men and women with teased hair and fanny packs, old people with melting faces riding electric wheelchairs, and dads with handlebar mustaches yelling at their kids. I could feel them watching me, sizing me up, recognizing me as an out-of-towner.

  On my way home I passed the courthouse and pulled a U-turn to check out the famous giant pecan mounted in front. Looking at it closely, I could see that it was covered in deep pockmarks that revealed that it was actually a concrete sculpture and not, in fact, an actual two-foot-long nut. Passersby looked at me strangely, probably confused as to why anyone would take such an interest in their big counterfeit nut.

  “Them ol’ kids come on down and raise hell on dat thang!”

  I turned to see an ancient woman in hot-pink lipstick. Her face looked to be made of saddle leather, and her spider-veined arms barely held her up on her walker. “Dagnabbit! Those hellions ’n’ their shootin’.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am. What?”

  “Those li’l sons-o’-bitches!” she groaned as her dentures slid down from behind her upper lip. “All summer they shoot at that-there pee-can wit’ dare bee-bee guns!”

  She continued to cuss as she strolled away from me, one of her pendulous breasts hanging six inches lower than the other beneath her Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. I tried to imagine what school here in the fall would be like, knowing that I’d probably never gel with high-schoolers who shot at fake legumes for fun.

  That night I waited until everyone fell asleep and dropped my hit of white blotter. I stole myself a rum and Dr. Pepper and trudged to the Primitive Baptist cemetery with my journal and cigarettes. As the acid kicked in, I laid myself across the graves of a couple who had died on the same day in 1914. I lit a dozen tea candles and surrounded myself with them. I smoked and wrote for seven hours, drifting in and out of a coma-like nap as the sun came up. It was perhaps my gothest moment ever. And no one was there to see it.

  Walking back to the house, I noticed a squirrel perched beneath a tree by the back door. It was standing perfectly still on its hind legs and staring at me intently, like it was going to say something. I crept toward it cautiously.