SCOTT McCLANAHAN
Tyrant Books
New York City
Tyrant Books
676A 9th Ave. #153
New York, New York 10036
www.NYTyrant.com
Copyright © 2013 Scott McClanahan
ISBN: 978-0-9850235-6-0
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.
Cover and book design by Adam Robinson
Cover art by Thomas R. Fletcher
#10 ------ what is this for?
For Sarah
Contents
Psychiatrists and Mountain Dew
How I Finally Became Cool
Rainelle
Wonder Woman Underoos
Vaseline
But There Were Good Times Too
Picking Blackberries
The Screaming Angels
The Day I Met Batman
Church
The Blind and Deaf Kid
The Football Bastards
The Basketball Monster
Porno
The Last Time
Psychiatrists and Mountain Dew
The Day of Isolation
My Anger Problem
The Return
PSYCHIATRISTS AND MOUNTAIN DEW
I used to hit myself in the face. Of course, I had to be careful about hitting myself now that I was dating Sarah. One night we got into a fight and I went into the bathroom to get rid of that sick feeling in my shoulders, and I did it. I wasn’t feeling any better afterwards, so I hit myself in the face one more time. I saw something behind me.
She had been standing there the whole time.
She was saying, “Did you just hit yourself in the face?”
“No,” I said trying to cover it up because I knew pretty girls weren’t crazy about guys who hit themselves in the face.
She said, “Yes you did. You’re hitting yourself in the face. I saw you and I heard it too.”
She asked me why I did it.
I kept denying it. “I did not punch myself in the face.”
She wouldn’t let it go.
She kept saying, “If you didn’t do it then what’s that big red welt on the side of your cheek? It’s all swollen.”
I went over to the mirror and looked at myself. O my god. I’ve always been vain. There was a knot on my face bigger than shit.
“O my god, I fucked up my face,” I said and started crying. “I fucked up my face. I fucked up my face.”
“So you were hitting yourself?” she said and went into the kitchen for some ice. “Goddamnit.”
I knew if she said Goddamnit—she was really pissed.
Goddamnit and I had to go and stay at Motel 8 for the night.
Goddamnit and I was moving my stuff into the basement.
I told her. “Will you get off my back, please? I hit myself in the face sometimes—it’s no big deal.”
Then I remembered we were going to my folk’s house that evening and here I was with this big knot on the side of my head.
O shit—I’d completely forgotten about my folks. For the rest of the day I went into a panic about getting the swelling down. I took the ice pack, put it on my cheek, and then every couple of minutes, I went over to the mirror and looked to see if the swelling had gone down.
I asked her, “Does it look better? Does it look any better?”
She said, “Well, it looks like you punched yourself in the face.”
She said I needed to quit messing with it and just sit down for a while. I put the ice pack back on my face and let it sit there. I took it off after fifteen minutes and asked again if it looked any better. She shook her head.
This went on and on until it was time to go.
Does it look better?
No.
Does it look better?
No.
Does it look better?
By the time we went over to my mom and dad’s the swelling had gone down, but you could still tell the cheek was swollen. As soon as I got out of the car I kept going over the story I was going to tell them if anyone noticed, about how it was dark and how I tripped over a laundry basket and almost killed myself.
Shitten ass laundry baskets.
But once inside nobody noticed, or at least they weren’t saying anything if they noticed. When I got back out to the car I told Sarah that I’d never hit myself in the face again—no matter how much I was hurting. I told her I’d never do it again. I promised her. I promised her it was the end. I promised her I was going to show her that things were different now.
Over the next couple of days I tried keeping my promise. One day I was in a crowd of people and I felt myself needing to do it, and instead of letting it rip, I just whispered, “Don’t do it. Whatever you do—don’t do it.”
Then a couple of days later I was feeling all stressed out, so I kept repeating. “You’re fine. You don’t need to do it.”
It was working.
I got the chance to see if it was really working just a couple of days later when I was sitting on the couch and Sarah came home and asked if I’d mowed the grass. For a couple of days I’d been telling her that I was going to mow it, but here it was Friday and I just didn’t feel like it. And for some reason when she said this I snapped. I stood up and told her, “No, I didn’t mow the grass and if you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you mow it?”
Just to be a pain in the ass and knowing it would piss me off, she said, “I’ll go out there and mow it. I don’t mind.”
I was pissed and I told her, “I don’t want you to mow the grass because I don’t want to spend the evening in the goddamn emergency room.”
She told me she was going to do it anyway.
This pissed me off even more, and I told her she wasn’t going to mow the grass because I was going to throw the lawnmower over the hill. That would show her.
“Sarah, I’m going to throw the fucking lawnmower over the hill.”
I went outside to throw the lawnmower over the hill. This all made sense at the time. When I tried opening the door I couldn’t get the door open, and my face hit the door. I walked outside and went behind the house to get the lawnmower, but then I looked up and Sarah was laughing at me from a window. So I came back inside and threw this bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking on the ground.
I told Sarah, “You make me want to hit myself in the face, but I’m not hitting myself in the face, and this shows I’m doing better.”
I was the winner. I was better now. There was Mountain Dew everywhere.
A couple of hours later we started getting into it again. I said something, and then she said something. Then she said something, and then I said something.
Then she said, “How come you can’t handle anything?”
This made me even more mad so I said something back to her. That pissed her off even more and then I saw that it was all lost.
I couldn’t get rid of the sick feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t get rid of the tightness in my shoulders like my head was going to pop off. And then it started playing in my head—the bad memories, the old bad memories. I made a fist. I took my fist and punched myself right in front of her. She shrieked and followed me into the bathroom.
She cried and said, “You need help baby. You just need to talk to somebody. You’re kind of fucked up.”
She said kind of to soften the blow. But I kept doing it—pop, pop. I fell to the floor. She screamed. I did it with the left hand. She screamed. I did it with the right hand. She screamed. Stop it. Stop it.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop because it felt good.
Just like right now I find m
yself getting ready to do it.
I hit myself.
I feel the blood surging to my head.
I hit myself.
I feel my jaw tightening.
I hit myself.
It feels like a prayer.
I hit myself.
It feels like something strange.
I hit myself.
It feels like something beautiful.
HOW I FINALLY BECAME COOL
I just wanted to be cool. Derrick was a lot older than I was (like fifteen), and I thought he was the coolest. I was nine. He was always shooting guns, or sighting in his bow, or chewing tobacco, or talking about how he was going to kick some guy’s ass. I was six years younger and I always followed him around. One day he asked me to come and play Atari Pitfall with him. It wasn’t fifteen minutes into being there that he disappeared into his mom and dad’s bedroom. It seemed like he was gone for a long time, but I just kept playing and didn’t really think anything about it until I got killed or something.
I heard Derrick saying, “Hey. Come back here. I want to show you something.”
I got up and walked down the hallway into his folk’s bedroom where he was standing over a metal filing cabinet beside his dad’s bed. I couldn’t believe I was getting to hang out with one of the older guys.
It was open and he said, “Let me show you.”
He reached into the filing cabinet, full of bills, and pulled out something from way in the back. I walked over to the metal filing cabinet to see what it was and I saw Derrick holding this Reader’s Digest size magazine in his hands.
It was this 1970’s style dirty book that didn’t even have any pictures in it really but just these drawings of people having sex and these little dirty stories to go along with them.
The drawings were the kind of drawings they have in the 1973 edition of The Joy of Sex where the men all have hairy chests and bushy beards, and the women have bushy things. We sat down on the bed and Derrick flipped through all of the pictures of dirty parts and told me about the stories. I was shocked, looking at the drawings of bare breasts and penises because I was still the kind of kid who thought babies came from French kissing, and French kissing was just sticking out the tip of your tongue and touching it against the tip of another person’s tongue.
Tongue, tip, a baby.
Derrick was flipping through the pages of the dirty book and saying, “Those are her tits. You see those, man?”
Then he said another word and I thought, “How do you spell that?”
He kept flipping through the drawings and the stories and I could see the drawings and stories and words from the stories.
At last I thought, “Ah, so that’s how you spell that.”
It was a whole new world for me. But then his dad, Frank, pulled up outside in his truck, and Derrick put away the dirty book.
Derrick started showing me things to make me cool. One night we went out in his truck, spotlighting for deer. He wasn’t old enough to drive but he drove. One day I helped him build a tree stand in the woods and put out a salt lick for some deer.
Weeks later, when nobody was at home, Derrick called me back into the bedroom because he had something else to show me. It was this magazine full of dirty stories and drawings, and ads for phone sex numbers. On the cover was a woman in her bra and panties, talking to someone on the phone. I sat down beside Derrick on the bed as he flipped through the drawings and stories, and he told me what they were. He flipped to a drawing of a woman touching herself.
He flipped to a drawing of a woman he said was giving “oral sex.”
He flipped to a bunch of phone sex ads in the back, with a woman who didn’t have any top on, and then to an ad of two women kissing and touching each other.
I thought, “Women can have sex with each other? This is amazing. Women can have sex with each other. What an amazing world.”
Derrick started doing something. He started pulling his greasy blue jeans down over his waist and he started groaning.
At first I didn’t know what he was doing, but I thought that if I changed the subject maybe he would stop.
So I stood up, listening to him groaning, and I said something stupid like, “When did your mom get this bed spread? It’s a really nice bedspread. If I had to describe this bedspread in two words I would describe it like this: ‘kick ass.’”
But he just kept doing it and giving me the commentary as he went along. “Hey don’t leave. I want to show you.”
He obviously didn’t want to talk about bedspreads.
I realized he wasn’t going to stop. I started walking to the other end of the room. He started doing it faster and sounding all out of breath.
“Hold on,” he shouted after me.
I kept walking out of the room and then walked all of the way home trying to get the pictures out of my head.
A month later I was back in that bedroom all alone with Derrick and we were going through his dad’s magazines. These weren’t just a bunch of stupid magazines full of stupid drawings, and dirty stories, and ads. These were glossy magazines I’d never seen before, full of shiny pictures of women with fake blonde hair, big breasts (fake too—Derrick said) and little tiny waists.
I sat down beside Derrick and he flipped through all of the glossy pictures. He flipped to pictures of women having sex with two men, a couple having sex, one man having sex with three women. I couldn’t even get a girlfriend, let alone get three women to have sex with me.
Then he asked me, “I want you to do something for me.”
I told him no and went into the other room. I walked over to the door and looked at all the things on the Anger wall like deer antlers and squirrel tails and fake paintings hillbillies always get for a couple of dollars at Dollar General. Then I walked back into the living room and back to the bedroom. It was time to make a decision.
Derrick was still going through the magazines on the bed, and so I said to him all nervous, “Ok. That thing you asked me about?”
My voice quivered and shook, “That thing you asked about earlier?”
I stopped.
I said, “I will.”
I told him he had to do it to me too because I didn’t want to get taken advantage of.
I was in 4th grade now. I needed to start looking out for myself.
A minute later I got down on my knees on this ratty old carpet. He pulled down his pants and all I could see was red.
I only did it for a second and made all kinds of screwy faces.
Then I went “uggghhh” and stood up.
“It tastes funny,” I said.
He looked confused like I was a big disappointment, and then he went down on his knees too. I pulled down my little red shorts and my penis looked so tiny compared to his, like a tiny vanilla tootsie roll. But then he did the same thing for a couple of seconds to me before he pulled away. I said, “It tastes funny, doesn’t it? I told you it tastes funny but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
He didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything either.
I just stood there with my pants pulled down and smiled.
Then I raised my arms high into the air like a great champion and at last I was laughing. I laughed a loud laugh and knew I knew something that none of the other kids knew. I laughed a loud laugh because I had finally been born.
RAINELLE
The road I grew up on was a strange enough place. It was an old gravel road on the side of a mountain with continental houses, which weren’t anything more than double wide trailers built on a foundation. There were all kinds of folks who lived there too, like the Fingis family, whose father worked for the railroad, and the Foxes whose father was a coal miner with black lung, the Boggesses who were on welfare and whose mother I caught peeing in the front yard one morning on my way to the bus. There were the Bennets, and Old Woman McKenzie, and the Wails, and then there were the Angers whose dad worked for The Fayette County Tree Company and who had a bumper sticker that said—Earth First, We’ll Log The Ot
her Planets Next. The Angers lived in this run down house painted baby blue with a giant praying Jesus in the front yard. One night I was there and I flipped the night light on and I saw cockroaches scurrying everywhere. I gave names to each of them. Poor little children.
The Angers were hardworking people. There was Derrick, who even though he was older used to always ride bikes with me. One day we got on our bikes and took off riding up towards the old water tower through the woods. We rode over paths worn thin by deer and down logging roads, and popped wheelies in the ruts made by the giant truck tires. We rode up by the old mine shaft and back, and then we rode towards the big mud hole and tried to jump it. I took my shirt off and let the mud splash up on my little boy belly and thought to myself this is the place where you could ride your bike without your shirt on.
This isn’t a place like Michigan, where I’d been the summer before, at my Uncle Leslie’s house, up the hillbilly highway, where all the kids gathered around and listened to me talk and started laughing, “He’s a hick. Listen to how he talks. He’s a hillbilly. You need subtitles to understand him.”
I cried not knowing what they meant. But this wasn’t that place. This was a place where no one cared how I talked my country talk or spelled my country words because they talked country talk too. So I rode down the dirt road on a broken bike without my shirt on and felt unwanted and apart as I popped a kick ass wheelie in the air. And O if I could only tell you how beautiful it feels to be a twelve year old boy, unwanted and alone in the world, and have your shirt off, riding your bike in the mountains.
After riding, Derrick and I went back to his house and watched his dad, Frank, getting ready to skin a deer. The deer was all hung up on the clothesline post with a telephone cord wrapped around its neck. And Frank was there in front of us kids smoking his cigarettes and grinning his no tooth grin. He had these light blue tattoos up and down his arms. I don’t know if Frank had ever done time before, but I knew his brother had been shot robbing a store with my uncle. So Frank had all these tattoos and I stood looking at them. There was one of a giant blue, jagged cross, the death date of his mother, one of a naked woman with big old boobs and then one on the forearm I couldn’t quite read. But I guess he could tell I wanted to know what it said, so he just turned it over, traced its blue outline with his greasy green, fingernail and he let me look at it.
Hill William Page 1