by David Crabb
“Hey there, little guy. What are you doing?” I got closer and closer, ten feet, then eight feet, and then five feet. “Well, aren’t you a brave little squirrel?”
His large black eyes stared into me, all-knowing. As I leaned down to him, I became convinced that he had something important to share.
“Do you have something to say to me? Who are you?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Mike yelled, shocking me off my feet. As I fell forward onto the squirrel, I could feel the hard, molded plastic of its artificial body mash into my face. I sat up quickly in an attempt to play it cool. But it was too late. Mike was convulsing in laughter. He slid down the screen door until he was on his haunches, covering his face and wheezing.
“You . . . thought . . . it . . . was . . . real . . .” he guffawed.
Mike was so entertained by this that he didn’t even ask me why I was up at 6:30. He simply chuckled and patted me on the back. “You’re weird, just like your mama.”
I spent that day locked in my room, nursing a hangover and calling all my friends from San Antonio, none of whom answered. I read the deep and meaningful poetry I’d written the night before and had no idea what it was about.
Locked in Catatonia,
A place to build a black brick home
Where you calmly arrange
Aunt Laura’s remains
On the entrance-hall wall
You peer through the sugarcane windows
To view the cadaverous children
Choking and gagging in the swampy mud
And clawing at the dying sun.
Covered by smoky funnel clouds
That cry on your black brick house
From tea to wine
All the time
Cutting clad crystal
In effervescent cultivation
Crawling up from pits of suicide contemplation
Where was Catatonia? What does it mean to “cut clad crystal”? Was “from tea to wine” a fancy way of saying “breakfast to dinner”? And, most important, who the hell was Aunt Laura? I didn’t have an aunt Laura. Even if I did and she was dead, we didn’t have an “entrance-hall wall” on which to display her remains.
Was Seguin sucking the creative spirit right out of me? What did this town, full of man-made replicas of nuts and animals, have to offer me? What did it mean that I’d wanted to kiss and touch Greg for so long, but that finally getting to had felt like nothing to me? I knew that something inside me was broken or defective. I didn’t know who I was without my friends and my school and FX. I didn’t know what role I played in this family or who I would be without my freedom.
I ran to my car after dinner and peeled out of the driveway. I drove past the strip malls, the Walmart, the fake nut; past the highway truck stop and farming-supply store and sewage-treatment plant. I drove until all the electric lights faded away, until it was just me and the moon and the road. I rolled the windows down and let in the wind. Out in the darkness I could hear the sound of toads and crickets and, somewhere, water. Soon I was entering New Braunfels. I didn’t choose to drive there as much as gravity pulled me there. I thought I’d be able to locate the house unseen in the night. But as I drove down Max’s street, he looked right into my eyes from the porch, watching me roll by at three miles an hour in my little blue car.
He sauntered over to my driver’s-side window in unlaced Docs and a tight Guinness T-shirt. He leaned into the window with a grin. I could see his barely-there Mohawk, like a three-inch-wide landing strip on top of his head. As I greeted him with an outstretched hand, his baby-faced smile disappeared.
“Max, right?” I asked. “It’s me. David.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my open hand still unshaken.
“You didn’t eat a Vicks inhaler on the way over, did you?”
“No. I promise.”
CHAPTER 23
I Like it Here—Can I Stay?
It’s a love song when you really listen to it!” yelled Max.
“Huh?” I said, rolling down the window to let out a cloud of pot smoke.
“I said, IT’S A LOVE SONG!”
It was hard to hear him over the banging drums and sneering guitars erupting from his crappy car speakers. It sounded like noise to me, like most of the music Max played during our car trips. In two weeks of friendship, we’d established a ritual: I drove to New Braunfels around noon and met Max at his house. We spent the day together, until 6 p.m., when my newly watchful mother demanded I be home for dinner. Sometimes we spent the day visiting his friends. Other times we just drove around—through the golf course, to the abandoned train bridge, or in circles around the famous water park, Schlitterbahn.
During this time we engaged in a kind of musical show-and-tell. He played me the Misfits, Hüsker Dü, or Fugazi, and then I played him the Smiths, Soft Cell, or Peter Murphy. Slowly, we were compiling a playlist of songs we both learned to love. Between us in the car was a black vinyl case of “our cassettes”: a growing collection of mixtapes that included the Lemonheads, New Order, the Sundays, Black Flag, and, surprisingly, Erasure.
I loved watching Max rock back and forth in the passenger seat with bloodshot eyes, screaming along to his favorite Erasure song, “Yahoo!,” a jubilantly gay dance hymn about higher love. Watching his massive frame pound the dashboard to Andy Bell’s sweet refrain, “find your way unto the Lord,” made me laugh every time—not because I was mocking Max but because his joyous abandon was that infectious. Maybe it was weird for him too, watching me with painted nails and a turquoise nose ring scream Mission of Burma’s, “That’s when I reach for my revolver! That’s when it all gets blown AWAY!”
The track du jour was “Ever,” a raucous song by the Lemonheads that had reminded me of sound-check feedback the first time I heard it. But over time, it slowly revealed its layers of melody. Passing the joint to Max, I considered his thesis.
“It is a love song, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he wheezed before releasing a cloud of smoke. “It sounds raw, right? Like he’s angry.”
“Right. But the lyrics are so sweet,” I sighed. “Like, he loves her so much.”
Max handed the joint back to me and grinned. “I told you it was a love song.”
An hour later we were at Sean’s house. Sean was Max’s best SHARP friend in New Braunfels. We’d met a few times, but he’d remained pretty icy toward me. Sean met us in the foyer, where he hugged Max and shook my hand, which always seemed less like a greeting and more like something I had to do to avoid being bludgeoned.
“What’s up?” Sean asked, his white-blond hair cropped to the skin.
“What’s up?” I replied, two octaves deeper than my actual voice. Sean walked ahead of us as Max, calling me out on my vocal machismo, mimed a squatting, orangutan-ish muscleman.
“Stop it,” I whispered, backhanding his arm.
A dozen people, mostly SHARPs, milled around Sean’s house. Each of them shook Max’s hand as he towered above them; they greeted him in voices I would’ve sworn were also unnaturally deep. At the dining-room table, a SHARP ripped the cap off a bottle with his teeth while another passionately read some manifesto aloud from a book. In the living room, a short, shirtless skinhead was repeatedly lifting cinder blocks as a small cluster of guys counted. There wasn’t a girl in sight. It was a penitentiary variant of my high school locker room.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Maintain eye contact.
“Max,” I whispered in the kitchen, “don’t these guys know that this is the hottest gay bar ever?”
“Hahaha! Crabb!” Max banged on the counter.
“I’m serious. They’re like every boy I ever liked in a photo of a Joy Division concert, but on steroids!”
Max leaned his head back with his mouth wide open. Not a sound came out for five seconds. Then, suddenly, a deep, hornlike blast of laughter boomed out. “Haaa . . . Haaa . . . Haaa . . .”
“Don’t any of these g
uys have girlfriends?” I asked, opening a soda.
“Dude,” Max composed himself, “a lot of them are straightedge.”
“I know that means they can’t get fucked up, but they can’t have sex either?”
“Yep. But weren’t rules made to be broken?” he said, flicking his tongue around the rim of his beer bottle. “Which one you want me to hook you up with, sexy?” Max started pretending to go down on the bottle. I tried to contain my laughter, fearing that Sean or one of his friends would walk in. “How about Sean?” he asked. Max turned to the counter and begin to hump it, slamming a drawer over and over again while moaning, “Oh, Sean. Fuck me harder!”
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Sean, appearing suddenly in the kitchen doorway and visibly perplexed by the scene.
“Oh man, I can’t find a bottle opener anywhere in here,” said Max, fumbling through the drawer he’d just been fucking.
Sean looked at Max, and then at me, and then back at Max. “It’s right there on the counter.”
“Oh,” Max said, holding up the opener and crossing his eyes. “Duh!”
“Come check something out,” Sean asked Max.
“Okay. Come on, Dave.”
“No. Just you,” said Sean, glaring at me.
Max rolled his eyes and handed me his beer. “Okay. I guess this is top-secret SHARP business.” He winked at me and followed Sean from the kitchen.
Five minutes into exploring the photos on Sean’s fridge, I thought I saw Max over my shoulder. I turned to show him a funny picture of Sean as a baby. “Aw. He was so cute.”
But it wasn’t Max. It was two guys I’d never met.
“Oh, hey. I thought you were someone else.” I could hear the pitch of my voice plummet so deep it sounded like a belch.
“Who the fuck are you?” asked the cinder block lifter.
“Oh, I’m friends with Sean. I mean—”
“You?” he asked incredulously. “Sean’s friends with you?”
“Well, we’re not, like, best friends forever.” I heard the words come out of my mouth and imagined myself in their eyes as a thirteen-year-old girl with an armful of Beanie Babies.
“Well, we’ve never seen you around here before.” They both took a step forward.
“Hey!” The deep baritone of Max’s voice was like a foghorn. He stood in the doorway, with Sean dwarfed by his side. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Oh, we were just talking to this guy, Max,” said one of them. The other nervously repeated, “Yeah, we were just talking.”
“His name is David,” said Max, adding sternly, “you two should introduce yourselves.”
And then, in the most forced pleasantry I’d ever been party to, each of them shook my hand, their voices quivering. The cinder block lifter’s hand shook in mine as I said, “Hello. I’m David.”
As quickly as we’d met, they fled the kitchen, presumably to open more bottles with their teeth and weightlift lumber.
“David, come down here,” said Max. “I gotta say bye to these guys.”
I followed him down the hallway and into Sean’s room, where half a dozen guys sat in a circle. In one of their hands was a small black gun. I’d seen rifles in person before, but never a pistol, like the ones cops had on TV shows. The boy holding it noticed me and quickly wrapped it in a small cloth.
“Who’s he?” I heard him ask as Max said good-bye. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know.
When we got back to Max’s house, the entire place smelled heavenly. His mother, Ruth, stood in the kitchen flipping burgers, her salt-and-pepper hair in a long ponytail.
“Well, hello, boys!”
“Hi, Ruth,” I replied, noticing the dinner spread on her dining-room table.
“I was just cooking for me and the girls,” she said as Max’s two little sisters cut lettuce and tomatoes behind her. “But there’s more than enough.”
“Oh, I can’t stay. My mom wants me home by six.”
“But it’s summertime. Is this some special dinner or something?”
“No, it’s just . . . My mom is being a little . . .”
“Mom, David was a really bad kid last year,” laughed Max.
“Shut up,” I said, snapping him with a dinner napkin. “It’s my curfew, and . . .”
“Nonsense,” Ruth said, picking up the phone. “What’s her number?”
“Ms. Fell, um . . . I can’t—”
“Two. One. Oh . . .” Max interrupted, shooting me a smile as he recited my number.
Our mothers must have talked for half an hour as Max and I played cards at the dining-room table. I could hear my mom cracking jokes on the other end of the line.
“Uh, I think you’re staying for dinner,” said Max with a wink.
“You’re actually staying overnight,” said Ruth as she hung up the phone.
“But I can’t, or my mom . . .”
“I told your mom that there are bars on all the windows and a moat around the house.”
Max laughed loudly with a mouth full of hamburger and hugged his mom as he passed behind her. “You’re a fucking riot, Mom.”
Noticing my worried face, Ruth patted my hand. “Seriously, I told her that by the time we eat and watch a movie it’ll be too late to drive. I also told her that I’m a single mom and could really use some help moving topsoil in the morning.”
“See? She fucking puts you to work,” yelled Max.
“Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck him,” replied Ruth. “Your mouth is like a fucking sewer, son.”
They laughed together in a way that made me miss my own mom. After dinner, Max popped the Lemonheads cassette into the kitchen stereo and started cleaning up. The house felt full and warm, the sound of the TV clashing with the Lemonheads in the kitchen and Max’s sisters giggling down the hall.
I was in someone else’s home in a space I barely knew, but as Max leaned against the counter and smiled at me, it felt like exactly where I was supposed to be.
One thing I prided myself on during my teens was my luxurious hair. Sometimes I parted it on the left. Sometimes I parted it on the right. I was unpredictable like that. But it’s styling, for the most part, always followed the hair choices of Depeche Mode’s sexy lead singer, Dave Gahan. On the left I was sporting an over-gelled “Violator”-era short-do. (In retrospect, it looks less dangerous and more “Rick Astley.”) On the right I was into Depeche Mode’s more grungy “Songs of Faith and Devotion” album, hence the Jesus-y locks and sultry smizing.
CHAPTER 24
You’re Gonna Need Someone on Your Side
My mother held the pillowcase from Sylvia’s bed against her chest.
“It looks like Tammy Faye Bakker had a run-in with my linens!”
“Mom, quiet!” I whispered as Sylvia and Greg ate breakfast in the next room. “She’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care if that girl hears me. She needs to wash her face before bed,” she exclaimed, shaking the black-and-red-smeared pillowcase in front of her. “I think I’ll have to burn this!”
Sylvia’s morning face was such a mess that it looked like a demon was eating eggs in our living room: blood-smeared lips tore bacon in half as bloodshot eyeballs peered up from two charcoal-encrusted holes.
“Breakfast is great, Teri!” she yelled from the couch.
“See, Mom? She’s trying to be nice,” I insisted. What my mother didn’t understand was that the sprawled-out girl watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with a plate of food resting on her massive boobs was simply making herself at home. “She likes it here, Mom. She likes you.”
“Well, she could have a bit more decorum.”
“But Mom, we’re all in our pajamas. We’re just relaxing.”
“Is ‘relaxing’ what you were doing out in the pasture until 3 a.m.?”
I could’ve answered honestly by saying, “No, Mother. Last night we were on ecstasy and Sylvia forced us to chase a cow she thought was a reincarnated shaman.” But that wouldn’t have gone over well.
So I said, “Mom, we were just looking at the animals. Greg and Sylvia don’t get out to the country much.”
“Well, they’re odd. And you know your mother loves odd people. But really . . .”
“Mom, you promised you’d be cool if I had some San Antonio friends visit.”
“I am being cool,” she said, aggressively setting the timer on the washing machine, “but I don’t see why they can’t be well-mannered like that Max.”
“I know, Mom. You love Max. Geez . . .”
“He is delightful and polite,” she said, dreamily holding a box of detergent to her chest. “He’s so handsome and considerate. And his mother is a treasure.”
Whenever my mother began to swoon over Max in relation to my San Antonio friends, a part of me wanted to interject with tales of Max stealing whiskey, and night-driving with the headlights off. He had the whole Eddie Haskell thing down. But whereas Eddie Haskell was a dick, Max was actually a great person. He just happened to have a penchant for hard drinking, whippit-huffing, and waking blackouts.
“Hello?” I heard Max say from the back door. My mom’s face lit up as Sylvia zipped past us like a comet.
“Bitch, my face isn’t on!” she screeched, locking herself in the bathroom.
“More like her face came off,” whispered my mother, “all over my sheets.”
I walked into the living room, where Max was standing with Greg, who looked up cautiously in his oversize sweatpants and giant New Order T-shirt.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Greg. Glad we could meet.”
Max towered over Greg in a way that made it look like they were different species. Greg readjusted his headband and tried to seem butch, which I was becoming an expert at. Seeing Greg attempt it with Max made me grin, wondering if I looked that hopeless when I tried.
“Hey bro,” said Greg as they extended arms, his purple fingernails and assorted rings disappearing in the gargantuan catcher’s mitt of Max’s hand.