by Ralphie May
“Why are you wearing a helmet?”
“I’m retarded.”
None of us knew what that meant.
I thought, “He’s retarded, I’m Methodist. Cool.” I just wanted to keep playing.
We were young—we couldn’t have been more than seven years old—and though we’d all heard the word retarded thrown around by the older kids, no one had ever bothered to define it for us. I doubt they even knew.
The Clarksville school district was no help either. Clarksville is a small town that lacked the resources for a separate special-needs class of any kind. Everyone was lumped in together—smart kids, dumb kids, kids who talked funny, kids who walked with a limp, even kids who wore helmets like Rusty. There was no obvious division between all of us that might have helped us understand what it meant to be retarded.
As we got older, our teachers told us more about Rusty’s condition. If someone new came to our school, they told us to say that he was mentally handicapped. If an adult asked, we could say that he had Down’s syndrome. Down’s syndrome? None of us knew what that was. How would we? Life Goes On didn’t premiere on ABC until we were all seniors in high school.
Rusty hated being labeled with Down’s syndrome. He didn’t enjoy being made to seem different from the rest of us. Nobody else had a “syndrome,” so he didn’t want one either. Retarded on the other hand? He was cool with that because, well, we were all retarded. I mean, we were kids. And kids as a group are kind of retarded. Have you ever watched a bunch of children left to their own devices? As a father of two young kids myself, I can confidently report that retarded is being generous. They are wild animals. At my house in Los Angeles every year, I throw a block party at the end of my street that is a combination end-of-summer celebration and joint birthday party for my kids. One year my boy August—who was right around the age Rusty and I were when we met—ran around the party in a cape like Darth Vader, whipping people in the legs as hard as he could with a long tree branch that he pretended was his light saber. Nobody paid it much mind. They didn’t get mad. How could they? He was a kid. Kids are idiots. Nothing had changed about that in the thirty-five years since I’d first met Rusty. So the idea that Rusty was somehow different from any of us, that he was “special,” never crossed his or our minds.
Down’s syndrome brings a lot of different health problems with it, but the one that afflicted Rusty the most was anxiety. His was severe. When it was triggered, he would slam his head against things—walls, desks, car dashboards, mailboxes (hence the helmet). When he’d have an episode. it was a sad sight, but none of us pitied him. He wasn’t somebody who wanted or needed to be treated with kid gloves. We took the same tests, played the same games, ate the same foods. He liked when we made fun of him for screwing up, the same way he made fun of one of us when we screwed up. When we played football after school, he would brag that he already had the proper equipment and made fun of us for being too poor to have helmets of our own. That was the kind of kid Rusty was. He was our buddy.
Middle school brought a lot of changes to our lives. We moved to a new school, puberty hit, awkward phases set in, girls became a thing. But Rusty had the most profound change of all of us. His penis grew like bamboo. I swear to God Almighty, this thing was so impressive Mark Twain could have written a short story about it. It was bigger than a baby arm by a wide margin. We had him measure it in class one time when we had a substitute teacher—it was nine and a half inches long, and thick. Way thick. Not paper-towel-tube thick. Spray-paint-can thick. Frankly, I was surprised he didn’t have to tie his dick around his waist like a belt just so he could walk around without stepping on it all day. It was something to behold. Like the aurora borealis, with balls attached.
I will say I did not appreciate how much joy Rusty got from reminding all of us that his wiener almost reached the end of the ruler. We get it, Rusty: you have the biggest wiener in Johnson County. Can’t you just let us fuck up with girls on our own, on the strength of our shitty personalities, without adding our physical shortcomings to the list?
In high school, Rusty didn’t need the helmet anymore. His anxiety hadn’t gone away, but how he dealt with it had changed. Instead of beating his head against the wall, he was now beating his meat. Sometimes, even in class. He would punish that pecker like it had stolen something from him. And there was no stopping him. Once Rusty started beating off, once he got hold of that wiener, them cums was coming out. Sweet Jesus, did he have prodigious loads. Unfortunately, precision did not accompany his production. When he finished, the area around him looked like someone had dropped a balloon full of papier-mâché paste from the ceiling.
Eventually the school staff had to develop a system for handling these incidents. You couldn’t just let him take the safety off that rocket launcher in a room full of teenagers. God forbid someone gets fragged. So whenever Rusty got agitated and the kraken came out, the teacher set off an alarm to get everybody else out of the room. I don’t think they pulled the fire alarm, since that seems pretty irresponsible, but in a small town maybe they could get away with it. They just had to call the firehouse and tell the boys, “Don’t you mind, it’s only Rusty playing with his firehose again.” Once we were all out of the room, they’d let Rusty beat off, then clean him up a little bit and put his crank back in his britches.
It wasn’t a great system, but what are you going to do? Things were different thirty years ago. You work with what you’re given. Thinking back, I’m impressed with the patience and care our teachers showed for Rusty. Can you imagine if an incident like that happened today? It’d end up on Snapchat and the teacher would file a workers’-comp claim with their union, like they were the ones who needed the most care.
As a good friend, I never made fun of Rusty for these incidents. I only did what any good friend would do. I used them to my advantage.
* * *
Late in the fall of our tenth-grade year, I woke up to one of the most beautiful Arkansas days I would ever experience. By 7:00 a.m. the sky was blue like a Sandals brochure. The sun had melted the cold snap out of the fall air. There was just enough of a breeze to remind you that winter was around the corner so you should take advantage of a day like this. It was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off weather. The kind that made you believe in infinite possibilities and made a high school classroom the last place on earth you wanted to be.
I called my buddy Duane Parnell and made an executive decision: We’re going to Big Piney.
Every high school has a place where kids go to cut school and get high. Ours was Big Piney—a big ol’ lake off the Arkansas River about thirty minutes from Clarksville with a beach and a swimming area and a couple of secluded, poorly lit parking lots where you could bring your girl at night when she was finally ready to bang. During the summer it’s a hot spot for families. Every other time, it’s a great spot for ditching school and hiding from state troopers. In the middle of the week, no one would be there and we could do whatever we wanted.
I called up two of our other friends, Sean and Jason, and gave them the lowdown. They were immediately in. Sean was the best looking of all of us, so I told him to find some girls to come with us. While he did that, I scraped together whatever cash I could find, I grabbed my piece-of-shit Styrofoam cooler and took my brother’s new truck to a gas station/convenience store across town with the intention of filling both those fuckers up.
I might be a big boy, but don’t let anyone tell you Ralphie May can’t get shit done with alacrity. By the time the bell rang for first period, we were all set. The truck had gas, the cooler had booze, and Sean had four girls who were up for anything—two of whom I thought I had a chance with if the day went according to plan.
The only thing left to figure out was how to get out of class early enough to take advantage of the beautiful day. Duane was the most concerned about that:
“Ralphie, how are we gonna get outta class?”
“Ralphie, why’d we even come to school in the first place?”
&
nbsp; “Ralphie, what’s the meaning of life?”
“Relax, I’ll take care of it,” I said finally as we walked from the parking lot to first period. “Just wait till English class and then play along.”
English class started just after 11:00 a.m. It was the first class of the day that all four of us boys had together. Waiting until then to make our move made getting to the car and getting out of the parking lot much easier. We all got to class early (for a change), and right away the other guys started bird-doggin’ me, looking for some kind of cue. Then Rusty walked in.
“Hey, Rusty, did you study?” I asked as he took his seat.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, kind of confused. Rusty hated being unprepared. It made him feel like he didn’t know something that everyone else knew, which made him feel like he didn’t belong. And that could trigger his anxiety … if you did it right.
“No, Rusty, did you study for the test?”
“What test?” Now he was more confused.
“The test we’re having today.”
“Uhhh, I don’t think we have a test today, Ralphie.”
“Oh, yes, we do, Rusty. We are having a fuckin’ test right now. And the teacher said that if one student fails, we all fail.” To a kid who wants nothing more than to feel like everybody else, that was some cold-blooded, enhanced-interrogation-technique shit.
“Oh, no, she did not,” Rusty said, panic rising in his throat.
Finally one of the Rhodes Scholars I called a coconspirator caught on and chimed in to back me up.
“Yeah, Rusty, we all fail if you fuck this up.”
We’d just hit Rusty’s anxiety trifecta. He was unprepared, everyone knew something that he didn’t, and it was all happening right now.
“Oh no. Oooohhhh noo!” He repeated this like a mantra, the no’s getting more and more guttural, until venting his anxiety verbally wasn’t enough. He started pulling at that big wiener through his pants like he was stretching taffy. We’d reached the tipping point. One more little nudge and it was all over but the jerking.
I shouted across the room, “Jason, Rusty hasn’t studied for the test! Now we’re all fucked.”
“Oooh noo! Ooohhh nooo!!!! Ooohhh nooo!!!!” He started shaking and pulling at his jeans.
Time to pack up and get ready to go. This class is dismissed.
Right on cue, the bell rang and Rusty pulled out the python. He started wrestling that thing like he was Jake “the Snake” Roberts. He beat the absolute living shit out of it. That his wiener was still attached to his body after all those years was either a feat of amazing durability or a testament to God’s grace, because only indestructible material or divine intervention could explain how something as delicate as a penis could endure all this stress and still maintain its structural integrity. It was a terrifying accomplishment.
No one in class was more terrified than the Baptist girls from East Mount Zion Trinity Church. Those girls were from the north side of Clarksville, the unincorporated part right along the edge of the Ozark National Forest. If they saw an erect penis before marriage, they thought they’d turn into pillars of salt right then and there, so the second the teacher came in, saw what was happening, and pulled the alarm, they ran out of there like the Lord himself was calling them toward the Rapture. They were out the door and gone faster than the four of us, and we were the ones with the big plans.
Within two minutes of the alarm’s sounding, we were piled into the truck with the girls, the go juice, some reefer, a tank of gas, and beautiful skies. It was one of the best Big Piney trips we took that year. And it was all thanks to Rusty and his pool noodle of a penis.
If I go to Hell when I die, it’ll be because of this.
* * *
Don’t feel too bad for Rusty. Not only did I get in trouble when it was found out we left school grounds after the alarm, but a few weeks later Rusty got his own revenge when he got me fired from my new job.
After digging change out of the sofa, searching all my pockets for extra dollar bills, and cuffing a ten-spot from my mama’s pocketbook just to make the Big Piney trip possible, I realized I needed to get an honest-to-goodness job. Something with a salary and a schedule. Clarksville didn’t have a ton of options for a poor high school kid whose main skill was being a smart-ass prankster, but this was 1987 and communism was beginning to crumble around the world, so there was hope. America was starting to feel its oats again and business owners were starting to be a little more generous with their opportunities.
Eventually I landed a cashier job at the McDonald’s on Rogers Street down by Interstate 40. Back in the day it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to work at a McDonald’s. It still isn’t in my opinion. Nothing builds ambition like working your ass off at a shitty job. Not that it was going to be all that bad. I got to handle the money, I got first pick of all the Happy Meal toys, I got free shift meals and a sweet-ass visor, and I’d be able to hook up my friends whenever they came by. It was the best two-hour job you could get.
On my first day, Rusty was the only one who came in. Like a true friend, I got him exactly what he wanted—a Quarter Pounder with cheese and a vanilla milk shake—despite all my reservations. Whenever Rusty had a milk shake he’d lose his damn mind from the brain freeze. He’d go into this eye-blinking, foot-stomping, temple-pressing spasm that was one of the only times he actually seemed retarded. I’d tell him he should slow down, but he didn’t quite understand the concept of brain freeze, so he’d ignore me. He thought I was trying to get him to stop because I’m fat and wanted to steal his milk shake. I tried bargaining with him, but his position was firm. Retarded people really love milk shakes, according to Rusty. There was no point.
So Rusty’s order comes up, I put it on a tray and hand it to him. You can tell me what happened next was accidental. You can forensically examine the facts of the case like it’s the Zapruder film and tell me he didn’t plan on getting me fired, and I’ll call you a damn liar, because this is what he did. Holding his tray directly in front of my register, eyeballing me like a sonuvabitch, he yells:
“Thank you so much for the free food, Ralphie May. I’ve never come to McDonald’s and gotten the free food ever. This is the greatest McDonald’s for free food of all time!”
As soon as he yelled “thank you” and “free food,” my boss was on me. He was not amused that I was giving away product—not even to a retarded kid. I tried to protest. I told him I didn’t remember reading in the employee handbook any explicit prohibition against hooking up your friends. I wanted to tell him that during my training shift the other employees said it was cool, as long as we took care of each other’s friends too, but I figured if I did that and it didn’t work, they’d blacklist me, and there was only one McDonald’s in Clarksville. You do not want to get banned from the only golden arches in your town, believe me.
So my boss fired me. I’d lasted two hours. Two and a half if you include the time it took for him to calculate my wages and cut me a check: $6.70. I’ve spent more time in a single visit to McDonald’s as a customer than I did as an employee.
Without missing a beat Rusty announces, “If you’re gonna fire Ralphie, I’ll come work for you, no problem.” My boss hired him on the spot. I can even understand his rationale: Rusty might be retarded, but at least he isn’t fucking stupid.
I should have seen it coming. Rusty had wanted a job so badly since we all took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test in October. I don’t know how he scored, but the US military-industrial complex determined that he possessed vocational aptitude of some sort. He was so proud. I was so pissed.
“What the hell are you doing, Rusty? You just got me fucking fired!”
“It’s fine, Ralphie, don’t worry.” He had that special retard twinkle in his eye. “I’ll hook you up.”
That’s some brazen, Machiavellian shit right there. And the worst part, if I accused him of it, no one would ever believe me.
* * *
Despite th
at motherfucker getting me fired and taking my job, Rusty was still our friend. He went everywhere with us. We hung out like he was a normal kid because, really, he was. We’d even take him to parties with us. He was hilarious in a crowd. He had a better sense of humor than half the openers I worked with coming up in Texas a few years later.
One time we took Rusty to a house party where we heard a bunch of Coal Hill girls were going to be. All the good ass came from Coal Hill, Arkansas, back in those days. Thanks to AIDS and Nancy Reagan, with her D.A.R.E. programs and her “Just Say No” propaganda, the rest of Johnson County was a dry vagina. If girls weren’t already afraid of getting pregnant, now they were afraid their pussy might fall off if they let your wiener get anywhere near it. And the ones who didn’t even think that way had a bunch of stingy fuckers from the church house telling them to save their flowers for Jesus. The whole thing was a disaster.
The only people who didn’t get the message were the girls from Coal Hill. Coal Hill is twenty minutes west of Clarksville and about a tenth of the size, with—at least in 1988—ten times more girls down to fuck. When you were at a party where Coal Hill girls showed up, it was like finding a bottle of whiskey in a dry county. You didn’t ask questions and you didn’t complain, you just tried to get a taste.
By the time we got to the party, everyone was feeling pretty good. It was the usual mix of characters at a high school party: the bros, the passed-out lightweights, the couples making out, the daredevils jumping off shit, the burners, the normal cliques of friends, the criers, and of course the crazy drunk girl.
The crazy drunk girl at this party was from Coal Hill, obviously. She was kind of cute in the way any girl in high school who seems like you might be able to bang her is cute. She was not cute enough to put up with her craziness, but her drunk screaming made her hard to ignore. All she would talk about was how much she wanted “big dick.” She shouted it over and over from the top of her lungs. It was getting to be too much, and I was about to tell her what was what, when I had an idea.