Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  “He’s a what?”

  Sylvia clutched the invisible pearls around her neck. “He’s a ‘prep’ now.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, Minerva,” she sighed, as if he’d been murdered. “I saw him in Alamo Heights the other day in a car full of Bowheads listening to Celine Dion. It was awful, David!”

  “Oh Sylvia, that’s horrible.”

  “That’s what happens when you leave your friends high and dry, Crabb,” she said, stomping to the kitchen to refill her vodka. “So we are going out tonight. Capisce?”

  “But I wanted to catch up and just chill.”

  Sylvia stared at me from the kitchen counter as a fiendish smile spread across her face.

  “What? What is it?” I asked. Slowly, she lifted her finger to point at the empty Dr. Pepper bottle beside me. “No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

  “You ain’t gonna chill tonight. I spiked that Dr. Pepper with two hits of Golden Purse acid!” she exclaimed excitedly, the way you’d wish a five-year-old “Happy Birthday!”

  The next few hours were a speedy blur. Golden Purse sounded like a fairly benign name for a hit of acid. Unfortunately, my golden purse was full of nightmares and razor blades. Something foreign and insidious loomed around every corner of Ryan’s dark apartment. As I begin to peak, every synaptic center of my brain shut down, as if I was checking out of my own consciousness. I became an emotion-free robot: superfocused, task-oriented, and humorless. I moved quickly through each action like it was part of my programming, like my mind was simply following my body through an endless list of small activities without free will.

  Pour a glass of water. Drink the water. The walls seem to be moving. The cigarette between your fingers is growing longer. Your hands look strange. Look into the mirror. You are hideous. Allow Sylvia to apply concealer, blush, and mascara to your broken face. You are now wearing the mask of a gorgeous stranger with lips that sparkle. Each of Sylvia’s breasts has a giant pink eye that will always know if you’re lying. So you will allow her to dress you in her clothes. Now you are driving her in your car. The roads are full of radioactive snakes and assorted vermin. The convenience-store cashier has a harelip and might be Jesus. He knows you’re a liar, but he loves you anyway. Where is your bracelet? Has anyone seen your bracelet? It was just on your wrist. Harelip doesn’t like that you’re crying now. Leave. Get out. Drive some more. Drive farther. You love this song. BUT WHY IS THIS SONG SO LOUD? The streetlights strobe through the car’s interior as we pass beneath them. Sylvia is beautiful then hideous, beautiful then hideous, beautiful then hideous. She looks like the angel of death. But in a nice way. You know what? You never actually liked that bracelet. You can’t feel anything. You can feel everything. How did gum get in your mouth? When will you die? How will you die? Why will you die?

  Let’s drive to Waco!

  Driving, driving, driving . . .

  Sylvia directed me off the highway and down a gravel road. The moon was beginning to set behind an airplane hangar–sized warehouse. We parked the car and walked into the tiny office attached to the front. From up a dark staircase in a thick Hill County drawl we heard, “How y’all doin’? Come on up!” As we ascended the staircase, I heard a deep, moaning hum. The rank, fetid odor of feces and something rotten filled my nostrils. A sixty-year-old man with a white handlebar mustache wearing a white ten-gallon cowboy hat welcomed us. He wore a crisp white suit and looked like the Weight Watchers’ “after” photo of Boss Hogg. He spread his arms like an angel inviting us into an unimaginable Elysium.

  “Howdy, y’all! My name is Hank. What brings y’all to the Glendale Slaughterhouse this morning?”

  I gripped the balcony and looked out over the endless expanse of cattle. Hundreds of cows were shoved against one another in a massive industrial barn. The hairs on my arm stood up as I thought, That’s just one huge animal in the shape of a big, flat, hairy blanket and it’s going to grow larger and soon the whole world will be covered in beady brown eyes and pendulous, drooping udders and we will all be a part of one grotesque, bovine amoeba!

  I could feel my face swell as I turned to Hank. The brim of his cowboy hat was moving in time with his lips as he tried to make awkward conversation. “It’s pretty early for y’all to be here on a Sunday, ain’t it?” he stammered, the stark white brim of his hat flopping up and down. “What can I do ya for?”

  I know what’s going on. Hank’s hat is really who we’re dealing with here. Hank’s hat is the ventriloquist, the mastermind behind his entire identity. Hank is just a dummy!

  I could tell that Hank’s hat psychically perceived my realization as it began to move more violently atop his head. I wanted to scream, Hank, look out! Your hat is eating your head!

  As Hank stared at us, it occurred to me that I’d been thinking for quite a while. Neither Sylvia nor I had actually been answering Hank’s questions. I wanted to say something, but no words came out of my mouth. I looked to Sylvia for help and saw her staring blankly down at the ground, biting her pinky nail and humming. I felt a sharp pain and realized that I’d just hit my pelvis with my fist, trying to beat a response out of my own body. Above me I saw the Glendale Slaughterhouse logo painted on a corrugated metal wall: an image of a grinning, upright-standing cow offering forth a juicy rib eye on a silver platter with its hoofed hand. I thought, Oh my God. Does that cow know what it is? Does it understand what it’s serving? Is that cow a cannibal?

  I turned to Sylvia in a panic. “Sylvia! Am I a cannibal?”

  Sylvia turned to me like a deer caught in headlights, her face a throbbing psychedelic explosion of black and silver and red. Her mascara-clumped eyelashes looked like the legs of a dozen tarantulas. I realized that she’d brought us there with no game plan. My tour guide down the rabbit hole had become lost in the terrifying field trip of her own making.

  Sylvia tried to answer Hank, fumbling with her purse as she piecemealed her story together in real time. “Uh . . . This is my brother and . . . uh, he’s in the 4-H Club and, well . . .” Sylvia dug deeper into her purse as key chains jingled and zippers unzipped. “Well, I’m . . . Uh . . . Oh! I’m buying him a COW!” As she pulled out her empty checkbook, an impossible number of tampons exploded from her purse, like some kind of feminine hygiene fireworks display. No fewer than twenty of them rocketed through the air before landing on the metal-grate floor between Hank and us.

  Hank stared at us like he was considering drawing his weapon. It occurred to me that he must have been really confused as to what two people like Sylvia and I were doing at the Glendale Slaughterhouse at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. How many boys with a future in agriculture wear rhinestone brooches and “Perfectly Pink” MAC lip balm?

  “MOOOOOO!”

  We looked over the balcony at a swollen, pregnant cow lying on her side with a pool of blood coming from her back end. I could feel the strychnine in the acid tighten and shrink my guts into a knot the size of a tennis ball. The cow looked up at me with big, wet, tired eyes and let out a long, exhausted groan, as if to say, There are days . . . and there are days.

  “Oh. Uh, sorry,” Hank said as he ran down the stairs. “Y’all wait here for a minute!”

  As soon as he left, Sylvia threw her arms around me and began to sob.

  “This is too much, girl! I can’t handle it. I’m gonna have a conniption fit or a seizure or something!”

  Just then, Hank appeared below us with a rifle. “Y’all might wanna turn away!”

  I stared transfixed into the cow’s eyes and for a brief, chemical-induced moment thought I could feel her psychically invade my mind. I could feel the pain of her long, confined life and empathize with what she’d endured and was about to experience. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t, hypnotized by the car crash but also feeling like I owed it to her to bear witness to this final humiliation.

  I am a superfocused, task-oriented robot, and this is part of my program tonight.

  The bang of Hank’s gun was so loud that it m
uted every sound after it. I was suddenly running—over the metal grating, down the stairs, through the gravel parking lot. I sprinted to my baby-blue ’87 Mercury Lynx and jumped inside. As I shifted the car into reverse, I felt a combination of terror and elation that I had been born into the body of a human and not a cow. I was peeling out of the lot when I heard a familiar shriek and realized I’d forgotten something: Sylvia. In the rearview mirror I saw her trip and fall in her four-inch heels. She became a whirling dervish of black gauze, spinning and struggling to regain her composure like Leatherface in that final, iconic scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  “Go!” she screamed, slamming the car door shut. “GOOOO!!!”

  Twenty minutes later we silently shuffled back into Ryan’s house, covered in a fine mist of sweat and dust, like zombies who’d been working construction jobs.

  “I need to be alone,” said Sylvia, staring blankly at a spot on my chest through tear-filled eyes. “I’ll be in my room for . . . forever.”

  Down the hall, I heard Sylvia lock Ryan’s bedroom door. I lay down on the couch, but my eyelids were superglued open. My guts were churning and my jaw was clenched so tightly that I thought my bite would shatter my teeth. I surveyed the living room, full of old pizza boxes and overflowing ashtrays. A water bong was knocked over in the corner and a pool of stinking pot-water had soaked into the carpeting around it. Fruit flies buzzed over a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. Everything was covered in cat hair and dust and smelled like musty tobacco.

  Outside, I heard voices. I ran to the venetian blinds and cautiously peeked out, like someone in a crack house expecting a raid. Across the street, a husband and wife in their midthirties were walking down their sidewalk with their kids, a boy about three and a girl around seven. They were the picture of nuclear, suburban bliss. They looked fit and tan and well-rested. The kids giggled as their mom helped them into the backseat of their car. She was slender and petite, with long blond hair and a knee-length floral dress fitted at the waist. Her husband helped her into the passenger’s seat, kissed her on the cheek, and shut the door. He walked around the SUV to the driver’s side while swinging his keys on his finger and whistling. He looked so boring in his stupid slacks. He was clean-shaven and wore a styled newscaster helmet of brown hair. I smirked and thought, Wow. I will never be that boring. I will never be like them.

  To my right, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the couch. My stomach did another somersault as Dick and Jane started their car across the street. Looking at my reflection, I saw that my hair had become completely mashed to the left side of my head. I was covered in a glistening sheen of sweat that had washed away the powder on my face. A horrible, subterranean zit had begun to swell on my right cheek. Sylvia’s thick application of eyeliner had run down both of my cheeks. I looked like a dandy teenage coal miner in a heat wave.

  Everything was crooked, dripping, misplaced, and sad. As the happy family outside zoomed away, my reflection reminded me, You will never be like them.

  Sometime later I woke up to a clock that read 7:37. It meant nothing to me. I’d slept for either thirty minutes or twelve hours. I knocked on Sylvia’s locked bedroom door, but she didn’t answer. I slipped on my shoes and walked to the driveway. Observing the quality of light outdoors still didn’t help me figure out the time. So I sat in my car and smoked for twenty minutes until I could tell that the sky was getting darker, not brighter. I’d been asleep on the couch for half a day.

  I drove with the windows down, letting the warm August wind blow through my hair. I bought a pack of gum, a Slurpee, and Marlboro Ultra Lights with my last eight dollars. The pregnant, 7-Eleven clerk looked at me fearfully throughout our exchange, keeping one of her hands out of sight behind the counter. In the car, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was a paler, more corpsey-looking version of the person I’d been that morning, the creep who’d watched that family through the window like a junkie sniper.

  As the sun disappeared and the stars came out, I drove, and drove, and drove.

  CHAPTER 27

  It All Gets Blown Away

  Greg had disappeared. Sylvia was too much. San Antonio was no more a home to me than Seguin, where I was starting my senior year. I toned down my look for the first day and wore a vest over a T-shirt and blue jeans with combat boots. I wore my hair down and shaggy, and not a drop of makeup. Unfortunately, the day before I’d gotten baked and overplucked my eyebrows to within an inch of their lives.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” my mother asked at dinner. “You look worried . . . or suspicious . . . Are you surprised?”

  The next day at school, I felt like an alien. In spite of my toned-down clothing, some of the kids were still perplexed by me. By midweek I had the nickname “RuPaul,” which reminded me how far from the real world I was. Seguin kids were so taken aback by me that their nearest cultural reference point was a seven-foot-tall, black drag queen.

  That first week of school was the longest I’d been away from Max. On Friday morning I put my weekend bag in the trunk of my car and slogged through the day, which was full of atrocities. I met one of the “alternative” kids in first period, but he’d somehow never heard of the Violent Femmes. At lunch I was forced to tuck in my T-shirt by a one-hundred-year-old science teacher with a tracheotomy. After English class I watched a hallway fight between two Hispanic girls, who were coating their faces with Vaseline between blows.

  “Why do they do that?” I asked a girl with a long braided ponytail under her cowboy hat.

  “Aw, hell, RuPaul. Don’t you know nothin’?” she replied. “Keeps their faces from gettin’ scratched. Those wetbacks are smart!”

  I couldn’t leave fast enough when the 3 p.m. bell rang. Max’s mother was the only person home when I got to their house. We sat on the couch in silence, watching television.

  “Have you talked to Max today?” she finally asked.

  “No. Why?” I asked, eating a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she’d given me.

  “No reason. How is school going? As awful as you’d thought?”

  “It’s pretty crappy. I can’t believe my mom moved us to that town.”

  “Your mom does the best she can,” Ruth said sharply. “It’s hard.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I said, realizing I’d upset her. “I didn’t mean anything. I just . . .”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said, patting my leg and getting up. “I had a long night.”

  The front door opened and Ruth went to the foyer. I could hear her and Max exchanging heated words.

  “You call next time, dammit,” she said, storming down the hall to her bedroom.

  “Hey, mister,” said Max behind me as he grabbed my shoulders. I looked up from the couch and saw his upside-down face smiling at me. “How’s my little Sequined Matador?”

  In Max’s room, we sat against his bed. He let out a long, tired sigh and pulled out a can of Scotchgard from beneath his bed.

  “Max, I can’t,” I said, placing my hand over his on the canister.

  “Aww, come on, man.”

  “No. I just don’t want to get fucked up for a while,” I said, still reeling from the slaughterhouse trip with Sylvia.

  He slid the Scotchgard back under the bed and told me about his first week at school, mentioning a bunch of names I’d never heard before. He seemed jumpy and preoccupied, getting up every fifteen minutes to take a phone call.

  “So we’re going to my friend Jamie’s party tonight.”

  “Cool,” I shrugged. “Who’s Jamie?”

  “She’s this girl I used to date,” Max answered, beckoning me into the kitchen.“It’ll be cool,” he said, taking out two thermoses and looking down the hall to make sure Ruth wasn’t coming. “Mom’s pissed at me because I stayed out last night.”

  “Like, all night?”

  “Yeah, but I was just with Sean,” he said, pouring me a rum and Coke and tightening the lid. “She didn’t have to freak out so much.”

  “Well, she was probabl
y worried about you.”

  Max stopped pouring and stared at me like I’d challenged him.

  “What?” I asked. “I’d be worried about you too.”

  In his car we shared a joint. As the interior filled with smoke and the sun set, his dimples came out and everything started to feel right. I told him about the crazed, Vaseline-faced girls of Seguin High School and he detailed all Sean’s dumb, macho antics at the previous night’s party. I pulled out our case of mixtapes and popped one in the cassette player. We tooled through New Braunfels for an hour, laughing and singing, driving nowhere in particular.

  “Hey, I need to make a pit stop,” Max said, popping in a different mixtape and pressing “play.” We pulled off the road and drove through a grove of trees as “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” blasted through the speakers. Bleary-eyed and baked, we screamed the song out the windows. Each beat of the drum hit like a sledgehammer crashing down on the lonely, Max-less week that had preceded this night. At the end of a dirt road we arrived at a small pond. Three cars were parked in a circle with their hazard lights blinking. A group of a dozen or so SHARPs sat on the cars’ hoods and bumpers, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes.

  “Stay here,” said Max as he parked the car. “I’ll be right back.”

  I grabbed the door handle, starting to get out. “Well, I can go if—”

  “No!” he barked. “Stay here!”

  Max walked toward the group and greeted them. He shook hands and hugged some of the guys in that awkward masculine way, making sure their torsos didn’t touch while aggressively patting each other’s backs. I recognized Sean and a few other guys, but most of them were older SHARPs I’d never seen.

  Slowly the group started to walk in a circle, like roosters—the way they had that night at Club FX two years earlier. As the SHARPs marched and thrashed their heads, clouds of dust rose from the ground and hovered in the orange light of the blinking flashers. In the spaces between their pacing bodies I noticed a boy, around fourteen. Through the haze I realized it was Rocky, the little, ginger-headed kid with freckles I’d seen at SHARP parties before. One by one, the SHARPs began taunting Rocky and smacking his head, pushing him back and forth across the circle between them like a beach ball. The kid took the abuse for a while, his fists clenched at his sides. He sneered at them to seem threatening, but he looked like a frightened kid in his older brother’s oversize, big-boy clothes. As they called him a pussy, a little bitch, and a faggot, my body slid deeper into the passenger seat. I was becoming small. I wanted to disappear.