Bad Kid

by David Crabb

  It wasn’t until one of the SHARPs spit in Rocky’s face that the kid reacted, spinning and screaming as he punched blindly anywhere he could, like an angry dreidel. His reaction was immediately crushed by a dozen angry SHARPs, all punching, kicking, and beating him at once. As a great, flashing cloud of dust enveloped them, I could hear the kid scream and cough, but he never yelled, “Stop!”

  In the blinking hazard lights I caught glimpses of Max’s face—a sneer of teeth and saliva, an open, screaming mouth, a tightened, swinging fist. After a few moments the group stopped. As the cloud of dust around them dissipated, I could see them standing in a circle and looking down.

  “Get up,” yelled Max.

  Rocky stayed on the ground in a ball, covering his head and begging, “Please, please, please . . .”

  As Max reached down and helped the boy up, I thought I saw a trace of the friend I knew. Max threw Rocky’s arm around his shoulder and helped him limp to a car, where he leaned against the hood. The kid’s bottom lip was broken in the middle, oozing a solid crimson line of blood that ran down the center of his chin, neck, and chest. A mound of swelling flesh surrounded his eye. Max smiled flatly, rubbed Rocky’s head, and embraced him. And then they all did. The fight club morphed into an agro love-in as the boys started hugging and shaking hands and passing each other beers.

  In the blinking lights I caught Sean looking in my direction. The smile evaporated from his face as he realized I was there.

  “What the fuck?” he asked Max, pointing at me. “You brought him?”

  “Yeah. So what?” Max replied.

  “That’s not fucking cool, man.” Sean marched to the passenger door and kicked it, glaring at me. “This shit isn’t for him.”

  “Calm the fuck down,” Max said. “He’s cool.”

  “Oh yeah?” replied Sean, shoving his index finger in Max’s chest. “Who says?”

  “I SAY!” said Max, his voice bellowing through the trees.

  Sean smirked at me through the car window and knocked on the glass, saying, “Hey Davey. Why don’t you roll down the window?”

  I reached for the window crank before Max barked, “Do not roll it down!”

  “I said roll down the fucking window!” Sean screamed. Slowly I rolled it down, my hands shaking as the other SHARPs began to circle the car. “So Davey,” Sean said with a huge, mocking grin as he leaned through the open window, “wanna join the club?”

  “Come the fuck on, Sean,” said Max. “Leave him alone.”

  “Let’s make him a SHARP, Max! He’s your best fucking friend, right?”

  The SHARPs surrounded the car now, each of them still breathing hard from the beatdown they’d just given Rocky. As they glared at me through the windshield, it occurred to me that they weren’t worn out but warmed up. All I could think about was the gun.

  Did the gun belong to one of them, or was it one of their dads’? Was I just really messed up that night and only thought I saw a gun? If the gun belonged to one of them, did they have it on their person? Was Sean about to grin a little bigger at me and tap the shiny, black tip of that gun on the windshield?

  “Get out!” yelled Sean as he reached out and opened the door. Max jumped in front of him and slammed it, grabbing Sean’s shirt and shoving him away. The other SHARPs looked at the two of them, and then at one another. Instead of retreating, they each took a few steps closer to the car. It was the first time I’d seen Max’s authority met with anything other than immediate obedience. He was the only person in my corner, and he couldn’t protect me alone. In the rearview mirror I saw two guys standing by the trunk. Another with a bullring in his nose leaned down to stare at me through the driver’s-side window. Through the settling dust ahead of me I could see Rocky limping forward with a glimmer in his eye, a look that suggested that he wanted to beat me more than anyone. And who could blame him? By beating me with them, he could really commune with this club he’d just joined. I was the guy they could all get their rocks off on by pulverizing. There wouldn’t be limits with me. They wouldn’t have to be careful. It wasn’t a beat-in or an initiation. I was an outsider. And I was in the wrong place.

  In the tension of the standoff I felt like my senses were heightened. I could hear the distant hum of traffic on I-35, the Doppler waves of crickets in the woods, the mechanical click of the car stereo turning the cassette over.

  Click.

  Suddenly, and with overwhelming volume, Erasure’s “Oh L’Amour” began to pulse from the car stereo. I sat still, too afraid to move, worried that reaching to mute the sound system would be perceived as gayer than the sound of the song itself. So I sat there, with my Patty Duke bob and my rum and Coke, surrounded by skinheads, as Andy Bell longingly wailed, “Mon amour. What’s a boy in love supposed to do?”

  It was as if time stopped, like they were all too stunned by the sheer queerness of the song to care as Max slid into the driver’s seat. The plaintive, fey cry of the lisping vocalist was too shocking for them to process as Max started the car. The propulsive twinkle of synthetic harpsichords was such a diversion that all they could do was stand there as we drove away.

  In actuality, the sweet, giddy sound of Erasure probably didn’t hypnotize anyone. I think it enraged them so much that allowing Max to leave was the only way they could be sure they wouldn’t kill me.

  We emerged from the grove of trees and onto the highway as a fine mist of rain coated the windshield. We didn’t speak. I felt like I should appreciate Max in that moment, as if I should’ve been thankful to him for getting me out of there. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about was that he was the one who had brought me. Max, like Sylvia before him, was the one who exposed me to the very danger he saved me from. So I didn’t feel protected. I wasn’t impressed or turned on. I was disappointed. Half an hour ago I’d been with my best friend. But now I was in the car with a sadistic, macho shithead, one of those monsters from the dance floor two years ago. My new best friend had just become nothing more than the guy who had beaten up my old best friend.

  “Look, that was just an initiation, okay?” he said after a long spell of silence. “Will you fucking talk to me?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t just go out and beat people up, okay? I used to, but not anymore.”

  “Well, Sean does, I bet.”

  “I’m not Sean,” yelled Max. “He enjoys it too much. It’s not supposed to be fun.”

  “Then what’s the fucking point of it?” I yelled at him, for the first time. “Why would you want to do that to someone? To anyone?”

  “What?” Max said, looking at me with genuine bewilderment.

  “Why would you do that if it doesn’t make anyone feel good?”

  “You don’t understand, David.”

  But I did understand. And I knew it was beneath Max. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that my watching it happen had sullied our friendship. “Why would you fucking bring me to that?”

  “Why shouldn’t you be able to go?” he sneered.

  “Because I’m not like you,” I murmured, more aware of it than I’d ever been. “And I don’t want to be.” I stared in silence at the road the rest of the way home, knowing that I couldn’t take back what I’d just said.

  At 4 a.m. I woke up in Max’s room, and he was gone. I crept to the living room and saw him sitting alone on the couch, cycling through cable channels, watching nothing on a loop and clicking the remote every fifteen seconds. I wanted to talk about what had happened, but a part of me didn’t care what Max was thinking. A certain feeling I’d had for him was no longer there. Looking at the back of his stubbly head and thick neck, silhouetted by the big-screen TV, I wondered if I hadn’t misinterpreted that “familiar feeling” I’d always had for Max. Perhaps I felt so close to him for all the wrong reasons. He wasn’t a kindred spirit; he was a repressed memory.

  The next morning I woke up under a blanket on the floor. Max was asleep in his bed. I got dressed, grabbed my bag, and
quietly headed down the hall to leave.

  “David?” I heard Ruth say. I turned to see her in the kitchen, making breakfast. “Where are you off to so early?”

  “I have to get back home.”

  “But it’s Saturday morning. You boys have the whole weekend.”

  “Sorry, I just need to get home.”

  “Oh,” she said. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked up to me, taking my hands in hers. There was a frailty in her eyes that I’d never seen before. She had always been affectionate and sensitive, but there was something else there now—something damaged, tired, and a little bit broken.

  “David, you know how much Max loves you?”

  “Um,” I replied, taken aback.

  “Well, I do too,” she said. “It’s nice to have you around. You’re a good influence.”

  She looked into my eyes for a long time, like she was going to say something else. But all that came out was, “Thank you.”

  On the drive home I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ruth had said. How was I anyone’s “good influence”? I was a queer, moody, drug-taking, school-skipping brat. I’d cost my father thousands of dollars and then broken his heart, and abandoned my mother when she needed me most. I thought about my own mom, and how Max played the same “good influence” role for her. How could two such bad kids be good for anyone, let alone each other?

  In the kitchen at home, my mother was cooking herself lunch.

  “Honey, you’re home!” she said, surprised to see me. “Mike took the kids to see their mom today, and I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “I was feeling sick and decided to come back.”

  “Well, let me feel your forehead,” she said, bending my face down to her cheek. “Oh, you’re a little warm.”

  I’ve probably been “warm” for an entire year, I thought.

  “How about we stay in and watch a movie?” she asked, handing me a cold washcloth for my head. “Your mother hasn’t watched a scary movie with you in ages.”

  Ten minutes later we were curled up on the couch with bowls of soup, watching Rosemary’s Baby. I’d taken a cold shower and put on comfortable clothes: gym shorts, ankle socks, and a huge shirt with a leprechaun on it.

  “I’m sorry. But when a neighbor you barely know whose niece just committed suicide brings you a chalky mousse to eat, you do not eat it!” declared my mom. “Especially in New York City. This Rosemary is not the brightest star in the sky.”

  An hour into the movie, I started to fall asleep. I felt my mother’s lips kiss my forehead and heard the delicate tinkling of spoons in bowls as she took our dirty dishes into the kitchen. I could feel my body sinking deeper into the couch, and I wasn’t fighting it. I felt tired and toxic. And as a screaming Mia Farrow was impregnated with the spawn of the devil on a black silk bed, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt like I was home.

  The Moby Dick of oversized sculptures of legume replicas: Seguin’s giant pecan.

  CHAPTER 28

  Being Boring

  My senior year was going to be the year I became a “teenager.” I surrendered: to my family, to school, to Seguin. I no longer saw the three people who’d meant the most to me: Greg, Sylvia, and Max. I’d lost Greg somewhere in San Antonio to a new crew who wore loafers and went to Glee Club. Sylvia was probably waiting somewhere in a clown mask with a bag of PCP-laced cat turds. And Max, he just didn’t call anymore. It was like we both knew something had splintered and we agreed, without words, to let it stay that way. I wanted new friends—friends who wouldn’t get me beat up or trick me into smoking crack or enter my body with produce. I wanted to feel what normal felt like. And I assumed it was somewhere on the spectrum between being a khaki-wearing wallflower and a Freon-huffing slaughterhouse creeper.

  I made a concerted effort to settle into life in Seguin. I sanded down my rough edges a bit and chopped off most of my hair. In the country it was easier to find open spaces to feel alone in, Primitive Baptist cemeteries not included. Each day after school I’d drive down a long dirt road ten minutes from our house. I’d park my little blue car by an open field with an abandoned shed in it. I would take my shirt off and lie in the grass, reading my first-semester English assignment, Brave New World, over and over again. By October I had an honest-to-God tan. I had never known that my skin could gain, let alone maintain, actual pigment. A thing called grunge was screaming its way onto mainstream radio, which I inadvertently familiarized myself with thanks to the thin wall between my and my little brother’s bedrooms. Before bed, I’d listen to a muffled Eddie Vedder screaming as I sketched, which I hadn’t done since I was a little kid.

  The strangest part of my life during the fall of 1992 was really just the act of going to class. The routine of it felt like such a novelty. But it really wasn’t so bad once I got used to the rhythm of it. I even decided to involve myself in a thing called an “extracurricular activity,” which my guidance counselor had suggested would help me “get into college.” Somehow, I managed to hold in my guffaw at her suggestion.

  Since I was drawing again and had always been interested in theater, I decided to join the set-design crew for the Seguin High School production of Into the Woods. The job itself was fine, but I’d overlooked one very troubling part of it: being around “theater people.” Loud, jubilant girls and flaming, overenunciating boys surrounded me every day after school. For the first few weeks I wanted to turn the nail gun on myself. Then I imagined turning it on the cast as Ministry’s “Stigmata” roared over the PA.

  Then I’d take a deep breath and remind myself, David, this is part of the process. And you’re on their turf, not the other way around.

  One afternoon I noticed some girls rehearsing onstage. One of them was a big, blond, cheery girl with sunlight virtually blasting out of her face. She had bright-blue eyes and massive, orblike boobs. She was playing one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters.

  “I wish to go the festival. The festival? The festival!”

  It should have driven me to nail-gun my ears closed. But this one girl’s booming presence and incredible voice made it all okay. Every day, she cracked me up. I’d howl with laughter from the back of the auditorium while gluing sequins onto a wooden cow or spray-painting cornstalks onto a curtain. No one else seemed to pay attention to rehearsals, too involved in school gossip or Sadie Hawkins Dance planning to notice the incredible talent in acid-washed jeans singing before them.

  Her name was Molly O’Brien. She noticed my laughter and eventually started playing to the back of the house, looking directly at me from the stage. I was her one-man audience—her audient, if you will. When we finally met I was nervous, like I was meeting someone I’d seen a lot on television. Ten minutes later I felt like I knew everything about her. Molly loved the beach and sweet cocktails and Janet Jackson. She sang in choir and was always busting out in huge explosions of song. She was the bizarro Sylvia. If Max was the mayor of freaks in New Braunfels, Molly was the queen of pep in Seguin.

  She introduced me to her social clique, and soon my circle of friends consisted of girls in Daisy Dukes with spiral perms and boys on the basketball team who wore flannel shirts and loved Stone Temple Pilots. I felt like Jane Goodall, observing myself in an exotic locale while thinking, I can’t let them know I’m not one of them.

  My being gay was a novelty for about a week. And then I was just . . . Dave.

  The structure of my social life became vastly different. A year earlier, I’d been snorting poppers with Sylvia and driving downtown to watch transsexual hookers fight behind the Alamo. But now I was riding in the back of someone’s mom’s Geo Metro squeezed tight with six people going to football games, cheering with a bunch of bros and blondes as the Sequined Matadors burst through a giant piece of craft paper onto the field. My new friends had curfews and part-time jobs, and so did I. By Christmas I’d moved from my dishwashing job at the Holiday Inn to a retail job at Seguin’s only music store, Hastings. I hated wearin
g the green apron and the price-gun belt, but the position made me significantly cooler to my new group of friends, whom Molly had named the Freedom Club, after George Michael’s 1992 hit song.

  The Freedom Club was a far cry from my former life, and I could sometimes hear Sylvia’s running monologue in response to our tame escapades. When we adorned Molly’s dad’s old VW van with rainbow colors and painted Freedom Van on the side, I could imagine Sylvia turning up her nose and shrieking, Minerva! Get me away from these Goody-fuckin’-Two-Shoes before I get a cavity!

  I imagined her on our spring-break trip to the beach, when our friend Cindy told us that she’d snuck something “crazy” into her purse and wanted to “party.” I braced myself for Sylvia’s brand of “crazy” and “party.” I thought, Well, I am eighteen now. Maybe it’s time I tried mainlining heroin through a syringe that someone stole from their diabetic father. After all, it is spring break. Then Cindy pulled a tiny bottle of grape liqueur from her Liz Claiborne purse and erupted into giggles. As I hooted and chanted “Party!” with everyone else in the van, I felt like the Johnny Depp character in 21 Jump Street. I’d become a narc, a twenty-six-year-old undercover police officer with a very youthful complexion who was this close to busting a high school dope ring.

  That duplicitous feeling was entirely gone by the time we graduated. It had taken a year, but I didn’t feel like an impostor anymore. I’d become . . . a teenager. And just in time.