Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  In the rearview mirror I saw my mother in a cloud of dust, waving good-bye with boxes of condoms, yelling, “Think with the right head, sweetie!”

  By 3 a.m., Max and I were sitting on Sean’s kitchen counter, drunk.

  “So, Max, where are Sean’s parents?” I slurred as a party raged in the next room.

  “Well, his mom’s dead and his dad works nights at a jail,” he said, popping open his umpteenth beer. “Just two of the reasons he’s such a dick.”

  “You really think your best friend’s a dick?”

  “A. He’s not my best friend. B. Yes. But most people are dicks, really.”

  “That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it?”

  “Thinking that makes things easier for me, because if everyone’s a dick then everyone’s hurt. And if everyone’s hurt, then everyone is . . . I don’t know.”

  “Everyone is what?”

  “Special, I guess,” he said, polishing off the beer he’d opened a minute earlier. “Like, if you meet someone and they seem super nice, you just don’t know the shitty parts yet. And the shitty parts are coming. Believe me. They always do.”

  Max filled my red plastic cup halfway with rum, tossed me a Coke, and continued. “But if I meet someone who’s a total dick right off the bat, then things can only get better, right? You have something to look forward to.”

  “So I just haven’t shown you my bad part yet, then, huh?”

  “You’re transparent,” he said, taking a long swig off the rum bottle. “I can already promise you your bad part is a fraction as bad as— Goddamn!” he yelled, his face wrinkling at the taste of the warm well-brand rum. “How do you drink this shit?!”

  “Well, the ‘bad part’ of me wants to tell you that you’re a fucking moron for not putting it on ice with a mixer,” I said with a smirk. “But since I’m so transparent and you’re the Buddha, you probably know that.”

  Max smiled back and lit a cigarette. “You know what I mean, David. I know what you want, is all.”

  He leaned beside me and threw his arm around my neck, pulling me in close to him. The drunken weight of his body pressed me against the counter.

  “See, Sean,” he whispered in my ear, pointing over the kitchen bar into the crowded living room. “He wants discord. He likes problems. But once you get to know him, you realize that what he really likes is solving problems. He’s just so fucking bored and uninspired in this bullshit town that he has to make problems to have anything to do.”

  Max leaned his head against mine, slurring with half-closed eyes. “And Jennifer,” he said, pointing to a girl with a shaved head on the sofa. “She’s a slut because her mom was a slut and her older sister was a slut. She wants someone to love her, but she doesn’t understand that you can’t fuck your way to that kind of comfort. And Rocky,” he whispered, pointing to a tiny fourteen-year-old skinhead with freckles and ginger hair. “He acts all tough and is always coming to these SHARP parties trying to be cool. He’s not actually one of us yet. He just wants a brother, I think. Wait . . . is his name Rocky?”

  Max reached up and rubbed his head in thought, his fingertips grazing my head, which rested against his. As I looked up at his face, the rest of the party receded into a black hole; every voice turned down and every light faded. Everything behind Max slipped into a blur when he looked into my eyes. For a moment, I couldn’t see past him.

  Just then, a beer bottle shattered. In the living room, the little redheaded wannabe-SHARP was cutting his chest with a broken Heineken bottle, an attempt to flirt with Jennifer, who watched with come-hither eyes from the torn, dirty couch.

  “See?” said Max, releasing me and letting out a huge belch. “I think that’s our cue.”

  Max stumbled behind me through the front door as Sean looked on.

  “You boys leaving already?” he asked, placing particular emphasis on the lispy S in boys.

  “Fuck you and good night,” exclaimed Max with barely open eyes.

  Sean looked at him and laughed, immediately charmed out of saying whatever homophobic slur was coming next.

  “Good night, Sean,” I said, smiling as I left. Sean shifted his focus to me and scowled, shaking his head, as if to say, How dare you?

  That night I lay in Max’s bed about to go to sleep when he wandered in with a Guinness and an aerosol can.

  “Max, don’t you want to go to sleep? We’re pretty fucked up.”

  “Dave, it’s only midnight. Come on, dude.”

  He sat on the floor Indian-style and gulped the beer, half of which spilled onto his shirt. “Wanna do some Scotchgard?”

  “That spray stuff you put on couches and leather jackets? How?”

  “Like this,” he said, spraying the Scotchgard onto the bottom of his T-shirt and covering his face with it. He took a deep inhale and leaned back against his bed. “Do it, Dave,” he said, his eyes closing as his mouth slackened.

  After a year of friendship with Sylvia, getting high this way seemed downright pedestrian. I sprayed the edge of the bedspread with Scotchgard, not wanting to stain my favorite Violent Femmes shirt or reveal any part of my naked torso to Max. I took a deep breath and immediately felt a numbing rush slip behind my eyes. The white noise of the room began to pulse in superstereo; a crashing wave of wah-wahs sped through my brain. VHS head cleaner had nothing on fabric and upholstery protector.

  “David. Wake up.”

  Max was shaking the back of my head. I had face-planted in the carpet and was drooling on his thigh.

  “What? Shit . . . Did I pass out?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a huge smile plastered on his face. “It happens. We should watch each other, okay?” He sprayed more Scotchgard onto his shirt.

  “Max, you’re going to do more?”

  “Yeah. Sean and me do this back and forth for half an hour. It’s total fucking euphoria. But if I pass out, you gotta wake me up in a couple minutes. Just to make sure I don’t have an adrenaline overdose and then a heart attack.”

  “A heart attack?” I asked, dreary-eyed.

  A million fairies were whizzing through my brain as the reggae music warped in and out of my aural field. I wanted to be concerned about Max’s possibly having a heart attack, but my body felt too good to care.

  “What is this reggae music you’re playing?” I asked, the bass line twisting through my spine.

  “It’s nah raggah, iss duhhh,” Max moaned through his shirt.

  “What?” I started to laugh. “I can’t fucking hear you.”

  “It’s not reggae. It’s dub!” he yelled louder through his shirt and laughed. Then he went silent, still upright but swaying with his eyes closed. His hands held the shirt up over his face, exposing his soft, tan belly and chest. I wanted to reach out and touch him; to wrap my arms around his body and hold him as tight as I could. He fell forward onto my crotch with a thud. His big, bald head rested right in between my legs. He murmured something and turned his head to the side. His shoulders pushed back against my thighs with each long, unconscious breath. Carefully, I reached down and placed my open palm against the back of his neck. I ran my fingers in circles on his scalp, which was soft yet sandpapery. I leaned down and ran my cheek along the side of his face, my ear grazing his. I always thought of Max as having brown hair, but this close to his skin I could see hundreds of fine blond hairs, like a smattering of gold dust across his skin.

  Wait. Is he breathing?

  I started shaking him violently, yelling, “Wake up!”

  Max sprung up on his feet with such intensity that he smashed the top of his head on the ceiling.

  “Oh God, Max! I thought you were dead!”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, rubbing his bruised scalp. “You have to be asleep for a long time!”

  “But you were,” I said. Max looked at me doubtfully. “I think.”

  Max delicately pushed me against the side of the bed, with his foot against my chest. “You fucker,” he grinned. “I’m going to get ice.”

  Af
ter Max walked out, I crawled into his bed from the floor. I stared up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan, one of its four blades slightly askew. My temples were warm and pulsing in time with my heartbeat. All I could smell was Max, and I curled up in his comforter.

  “Dude, you’re not passing out,” said Max, walking in with a plastic bag of ice on his head. He grabbed the Scotchgard and sat on the bed next to me. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  “More? How much of this stuff can you do at once?”

  “I don’t know,” he winked at me. “Let’s find out.”

  We lay in his bed groggily, laughing and trancing out on the music for a while, occasionally shaking each other awake from a puddle of drool. Eventually the conversation turned to our families.

  “So you’re in this shithole because your dad flaked on you?”

  “He didn’t flake,” I replied. “I fucked him over.”

  “So you think he doesn’t love you?” Max asked, spraying the last bit of Scotchgard onto his shirt.

  “Not like he used to.”

  “He will again, Dave,” Max said, covering my mouth with part of his shirt. “Take the last huff.”

  As my brain became goo and my extremities went numb, I asked, “What happened to your dad?”

  “You have really beautiful eyes,” he said, his face a foot from mine.

  The last thing I remembered before passing out was Max saying that he knew what I wanted. I really hoped he didn’t.

  As the summer continued, my feelings for Max became more intense, but I didn’t know how to process them because I wasn’t sure what they were. When Greg and I would go to the Bonham Exchange and watch strippers or check out guys at after-parties, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted from them. I built a small shrine to Keanu Reeves after seeing My Own Private Idaho, imagining him to be a delicate lover and an ideal long-term companion. Our fantasy relationship involved a lot of wine, poetry, and travel. Marky Mark would be my closeted booty call. It would only happen once a month, when he came through town, and I’d keep it a secret if I knew what was good for me. I could project myself into a myriad of sexual scenarios with the models from the International Male catalog, most of which took place to a sound track by Nine Inch Nails.

  When I’d been Greg’s best friend, not being able to kiss him had felt like a constant thorn in my side, to the point that being in his presence sometimes felt like torture. But Max was different. I would miss him and ache to hear the sound of his voice, but as soon as I was in his presence, any negative feeling subsided. It wasn’t so much that I needed to touch him. I just needed to know that he was close enough that I could.

  Wanting to be near him was fine, but I kept thinking that I should be wanting less and doing more. I was a gay seventeen-year-old who’d just come out to his family. I was supposed to be meeting guys and flirting with them and . . . other stuff. Being an adult gay male surely meant having lots of sex, everywhere, all the time: in beds, on couches, in backyards, in club restrooms, in the backseats of cars. But instead of going to the Bonham with Sylvia or tracking down my gay friends in San Antonio, I was constantly hanging out with a heterosexual skinhead in a tiny town surrounded by aggressive straight guys, males who were so suspicious of my presence that Max had to be my bodyguard. That couldn’t be good for my burgeoning sexual identity.

  What did it mean that kissing and touching Greg had felt like nothing, yet just being at arm’s length from this utterly unattainable boy made me feel like my head was spinning? And as unlikely a lover as Max seemed, why was he hanging out with a tiny goth gay boy? He laughed at all my jokes, hugged me every ten minutes, and had me practically living in his bedroom for half the summer. He told me I had beautiful eyes, for Christ’s sake! What heterosexual boy tells a homosexual boy that he has beautiful eyes while lying in bed with him? (Well, maybe one who’d been huffing furniture protector every night since the summer started.)

  After that night, I felt an increasing discomfort. Over the next few weeks with Max I became distant: watching myself watch Max, doubting my intention when patting him on the back after he cracked a joke, scanning the room of SHARPs to make sure no one had seen me looking at Max’s lips or hands or butt while he talked to someone else. Sylvia sensed it. Sean seemed suspicious. My own mother forced condoms on me simply because I was going to Max’s house. It was that obvious. And I had to make sense of it all somehow.

  It was the end of July. In a month, school would start. Max was driving me into the sunset with the Lemonheads playing as I processed all these thoughts over and over again in a loop.

  “What’s wrong, my little Sequined Matador?” Max asked. He rested his hand on my shoulder and it felt like it was burning through my shirt. I leaned forward and turned down the stereo so that his hand would slip away. I had reached a threshold with the amount of physical contact I could receive from him.

  “Max, do you like me?”

  I could feel my heartbeat begin to race as he leaned forward to turn off the stereo.

  “Well, hmmm . . .” Max scratched the little bit of hair on his chin and cleared his throat. “There’s a few things,” he began slowly while staring ahead, like someone delivering a book report from memory. “No one makes me laugh as much as you do. And I wish you were part of my family. Like, my mom really likes you, and, uh . . .” Max grinned at me and quickly looked away, squirming in his seat a bit. “I guess what I’m saying is, if I was gay that would be awesome. Like, I would be your, uh . . . boyfriend for sure, but . . . I’m not,” he said with a nervous smile, each cheek dimpling as he morphed into my big toddler skinhead. “I just really like you.”

  Then he reached out, turned up the stereo, and, in a tuneless baritone, sang the entirety of the Lemonheads’ Lick album to me.

  I had my answer. I could breathe. After weeks of confusion and mixed signals, Max had alleviated all my fears and doubts. I could finally relax, knowing nothing was ever going to happen between us. And in that clearheaded moment following his answer, I looked at his sunlit face singing to the road ahead of us and thought, Oh, wow. I am so in love with you.

  Warm leatherette:

  Here I am in my 1987 baby blue Mercury Lynx. Or as Sylvia called it, “A poor man’s Ford Escort.”

  CHAPTER 26

  This Beautiful Creature Must Die

  David! You have to phone that girl!” My mother had been deflecting Sylvia’s calls for weeks. “Honey, your mother cannot handle another desperate call from her. I’ve given her advice about her brassieres and ingrown toenails and counseled her through a breakup with a bisexual man named Linus,” she complained. “Call her, if only to say, ‘Leave my poor, sweet mother alone!’”

  I called Sylvia that afternoon to catch up. She was broke, single, and lonely. I knew this was all her own doing, but I still felt bad for her. I couldn’t find it in my heart to deny her invitation to visit, especially since she still didn’t have a car.

  “Mom,” I asked, “can I go visit Sylvia for just one night?”

  “School starts in two weeks and you’ve been well-behaved all summer. So I’ll let you have this one last hurrah.”

  I didn’t tell my mom that the reason I seemed so well-behaved was the chemical stupor I was in from my daily huffing of household products, but I took her up on her offer and drove to San Antonio that night. It would be a relaxing evening in, catching up with an old friend. A night away from my brother-friend-husband-roommate, Max, might help me work out the increasingly tight knot in my heart.

  “It’s ninety-nine degrees, bitch,” said Sylvia as she handed me a Dr. Pepper. “You look like you just jumped out of the river.”

  “My AC broke,” I said, gulping down half the soda before holding it against my sweat-soaked chest.

  “Girl, you are just simple white trash with no AC,” she said, curling up on a tan recliner covered in cat hair.

  “It’s probably broken because you sucked all the Freon out.”

  “At least Ryan has central
air-conditioning here.”

  “Well, Sylvia. At least I have my own car,” I replied, chugging the rest of the Dr. Pepper.

  Sylvia had been sleeping at her friend Ryan’s apartment for a week, ever since Ray-Ray had kicked her out.

  “Yeah, girl,” she said, with Voltaire in her lap. “He passed out at a party one night, so I took out a Sharpie and wrote all over the bitch. ‘MISS THANG’ on his forehead and pentagrams on his ass cheeks. He was not happy!”

  “Sylvia, that’s horrible,” I said, trying to stifle my laughter at the thought of Ray-Ray’s frightful reflection greeting him the next morning.

  “I know, Minerva. But I was just havin’ a little fun,” she said, getting up to pour herself a vodka tonic. “So he lost a few days of work at Dairy Queen! They should loosen up their dress code. Who’s to say it wouldn’t be a treat to order a Blizzard from a queen with penises scrawled on his cheeks?” Sylvia almost toppled over laughing at her little prank.

  “Sylvia, are we the only ones here tonight?”

  “Yep,” she sighed, plopping down in her chair/recliner/bed.

  “Oh, great. Then we can just bring home burgers from Wendy’s and hang out!”

  “Bitch, are you crazy?” she said. “We’re going out tonight, Minerva!”

  “But Sylvia . . .”

  “Don’t give me no lip, bitchface!” she demanded, stamping out her cigarette so hard that the ashtray spilled over the arm of the chair. “Goddammit! See what my life has been like? Just one bad thing after another! No job. No place of my own. No man and no friends!”

  “Well, what about Greg?” I asked. “He hasn’t answered his phone in weeks. I assumed y’all were going out and having fun.”

  “Fun?” she hissed, scooping the butts off the carpet. “I heard Greg went to rehab.”

  “Greg went to rehab?”

  “Bitch, are you serious? It was almost two months ago!” she barked, furiously scrubbing the carpet. “Shit went down while you were off in Hicksville with your new daddy.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Look!” Sylvia was wild-eyed and angry. “You’ve been MIA. Greg’s parents moved him to Alamo Heights High School, and he’s a . . . Well, he’s a . . .”