Bad Kid (27 page)

I put my lips on the bong and inhaled, letting the thick, warm funk fill my lungs and take me somewhere else.

“I missed you,” she said. “And I'm sorry. About everything.”

“Me too,” I choked out, holding a giant cloud of smoke inside my chest.

“I'm glad you're here, David.”

Sylvia let go of my hand and got up. I could feel the damp moisture
on our palms as they grazed each other. I lit a cigarette as she walked across the living room and pressed play on the CD player, filling the apartment with the sound of a song. It was a song I knew and loved but couldn't name. In the glass of a frame across the room I caught my reflection, dressed in all black again, but for a different reason. Behind the glass is a photo. In it, most of my friends are on a dance floor, probably FX, but maybe not. Sylvia is there in a black smock throwing a shady look to Raven and Carla, who are wearing dog collars and sticking their tongues out while dry-humping each other. Hector is there in his torn blazer with the words “I am human and I need to be loved” scrawled across the lapel. Daphne is in the back, sipping from a plastic cup, looking bored and staring off with glowing red eyes. Jake is shirtless and covered in sweat, head back and eyes closed, fully surrendered to the music playing. Greg is in the foreground with his perfect bangs, reaching toward the lens. He's gesturing to whoever's taking the photo, his index finger wagging them toward him. His mouth is frozen midword, probably saying something like, “Come on! Come dance with me!”

The flash is unflattering; the harsh truth of the camera eye reveals every zit, pore, and smeared eyebrow. They're clumpy and drippy and torn, trying to come off world-weary and sexy but failing in the most charming way. Collectively, they think they're almost there, standing at the threshold of becoming who they're going to be for the rest of their lives, not knowing that they've, thankfully, just begun.

They're brash, flighty, messy kids. But in that frame beneath a pane of glass, they transcend all that. They're special, preserved, and perfect. I look at the picture and try to imagine having known anyone else, but I can't. Because when I look at the picture, all I can think is,
I am just like them
.

I pressed myself back into the couch, feeling the cool fabric of the upholstery against my arms and neck. I let out a long sigh and smiled as Sylvia turned from the stereo to look at me.

“What?” she asked, flashing me a smile I'd missed so much.

“Nothing,” I said, “I'm just glad I'm here too.”

I
.D., please,” said Varla before taking my Texas driver's license in her huge, hairy-knuckled fingers. Varla Rose was a sensationally messy drag queen known less for her stage shows and more for her nasty attitude, which was generally served out the side of her half-frozen face. Tonight at the Bonham Exchange I'd be seeing her ill-reviewed show, which I'd heard entailed less actual dancing and more drunken leaning: against poles, chairs, and walls. I'd told my friends that if we were lucky, things would get physical. We might get to see her verbally degrade someone or snap a nail off in another diva's wig.

“That's pretty sad when a drag queen has to check IDs for
her own show
,” whispered Shelly through her long, kinky red bangs.

“Thanks, peaches,” slurred Varla, letting out a belch. As her left eye wandered in a different direction from her right, I had a feeling we'd be in for a great show.

“It's barely eleven and she's already walleyed,” I whispered as we walked into the club. Shelly tilted back her head and laughed like a maniac, showing off the wide gap between her two front teeth.

“You could park a car in there,” I chuckled, pointing at her gaping maw.

She smacked the back of my head and looked back to our friends. “Hurry up, fuckers!”

Behind us was Jeff, a tall philosophy major with prematurely salt-and-pepper hair. I knew him through Kim, the petite blonde beside him whom I'd met in my still-life photography class. I'd met Shelly during my sophomore year in college as an art major. Tonight I was taking us all to the Bonham Exchange, which I was entering legally for the first time as a twenty-one-year-old.

“Wait up,” yelled Kim, running up in her thrift-store heels and baby-doll dress. “I need to fix your hair, Crabb,” she said, reaching up to finesse the bleach-blond spikes of my Mohawk. “It's like a haystack or some shit!”

“Where's the bathroom?” Jeff asked, fanning himself in the club's crowded main hall. He looked at himself in a mirror and gasped, “Oh, girl. I need to pull my face together.”

“Actually, I need to powder my nose,” added Kim with a wink.

“It's right over there,” I screamed over the distant thump of house music. “Meet us on the dance floor!”

Shelly and I moved down the wide, eighty-foot-long hallway of the old synagogue, squeezing through a mix of young- to middle-aged gay San Antonians in their Friday-night best. They fanned themselves with flyers and free downtown papers in the mid-July heat.

“These guys are so hot!” yelled Shelly, passing a gaggle of lean Hispanic men with perfectly shaped beards in fitted black tops. “I feel like a hippie schlub, David!”

“Shut up! You look beautiful!” I screamed back, catching our reflections as we passed a mirrored wall. Shelly was in purple leggings and a blue velveteen dress, each arm covered in a dozen chunky vintage bracelets. She wore her favorite beaded lip ring and a floppy brimmed hat atop wild auburn curls. I wore my favorite Smashing Pumpkins shirt under a too-small vest that was covered in band pins for Hole, Garbage, and the Pixies. My torn blue jeans and Converse high-tops were stained from semesters' worth of painting classes and photo-chemical mishaps.

The grungy, alt-rock nineties were in full swing. Any attraction I'd had to clean lines and grayscale was long gone. I was queer. I was an art major. And I was twenty-one.

“This is amazing!” Shelly screamed, looking up at the massive disco ball hanging from the three-story vaulted ceiling.

It was as amazing as I'd remembered it being three years earlier, the last time I'd snuck in. It was nice to be back, and I was relieved that not much had changed. I ordered drink upon drink, proudly flashing the glow-in-the-dark stamp on my left hand. At midnight on the patio I grabbed Kim's hand and dragged her around the side of the building.

“Where are you fucking taking me, Crabb?” she demanded, covering her nose from the stench of the alley's dumpsters.

“It's still there!” I exclaimed, slurring a bit.

“Are you high?” she laughed as I pushed on the loose two-by-four. “It's a hole in a fence!”

“Yeah,” I smiled, realizing I was far too drunk to explain what that hole meant to me.

Everywhere on the dance floor I noticed a certain type of boy: boys with badly copied stamps smeared on their hands; boys hanging on the darker edge of the dance floor for fear that the pulsing lights would reveal their peach fuzz and acne; boys on the arms of their loud, brassy girlfriends, hiding in plain sight with cohorts they call their brothers who they're actually dying to kiss; boys who owed the first genuinely dazzling night of their lives to a hole in a fence.

By 2 a.m. I'd lost Kim and Jeff to some other part of the club. Shelly had met a short, pixie-haired lesbian named Sky, whom she'd decided to flirt with in the basement. Although Shelly wasn't gay, she
was
a liberal-arts major who listened to a lot of Sarah McLachlan. Eventually Shelly and Sky started making out at the bar, violently flicking their tongue piercings together as a remix of Madonna's “Don't Cry for Me, Argentina” blared through the sound system.

I took my cue and left to walk around alone, drunkenly trying to recall the spots where I'd gotten sick from tequila or tipped my first stripper or felt the explosion of a thousand supernovas in my chest as a tab of acid kicked in.

In the small ground-floor bar I sat alone and thought about the only night I'd come here with Max. I remembered sitting in exactly the same spot, with Greg and Sylvia laughing on either side of me about nothing I could recall. I wasn't listening to them because I was staring at Max, twenty feet away, cornered by two older queens who were ogling him like a piece of meat, their eyes wandering up and down his figure. It was nice to be the one checking in on Max for a change, and charming to watch him suffer their questions so politely. As the two men cackled about something and gave each other a high five, Max looked at me
with those squinty Buddha eyes and shrugged with the sweetest smile I'd ever seen, a giant sun patiently shining light on all the tiny moons drawn into his orbit. Max was simply too full of love not to give it to anyone who asked, if only for a moment; even to a couple of drunk queens three times his age trying to get into his pants. I remembered that moment as he looked at me and how I knew, in some ineffable way, that love as strong as this wasn't about reciprocity. The gift wasn't in having it returned, but in feeling it at all, if only for one incredible summer.

I got up from the bar and moved through the main hall, reaching the crowded grand staircase, an eight-foot-wide walkway that led to the upstairs ballroom. I squeezed myself onto the first step of the staircase, which was as dense as a New York City subway entrance at rush hour.

“Move it, girl!” a platinum-headed man in front of me yelled to a group of stationary boys on the landing above. “You can't stand there, assholes!”

I slowly moved up another two stairs as more bodies piled up at my back.

“Sorry,” said a voice behind me as I tripped forward.

“Watch it,” I began, prepared to tell off the asshole at my heels. Over my shoulder was a tall boy about my age with short, brown hair, wearing chunky black glasses and a red T-shirt.

“Oh,” I stammered, taken aback by the fact that even on the stair behind me, he was still a bit taller. “It's okay.”

“There's just so many people and—”

“Watch yourself, motherfucker!” someone ahead interrupted. I stood on my tiptoes to see a ponytailed twink being yelled at by a very inebriated Varla Rose, her left eye now fully disengaged from her right.

“You think you know glamour, bitch?!” Varla raged, teetering on her heels while brandishing a beer bottle over her head.

Two security guards rushed past me just as they began to fight. As they were dragged down the staircase, I looked over my shoulder.

“Looks like Varla's show probably won't . . .” but the boy in chunky glasses was gone.

On the landing, things got tighter as a horde of shirtless boys came down the stairs, their cluster too wide to accommodate for the traffic on the right side of the staircase.

“David!” I heard someone yell in the crowd. I turned as the voice yelled my name again from somewhere behind me. I looked down and saw him, four bodies away. He was shirtless and glistening, with a tribal tattoo across his six-pack abs. He was adorned with neon glow-stick necklaces and tiny silver hoops in each ear.

“Greg!” I screamed, trying to turn myself around on the staircase.

“David! Oh my God!” he beamed, his hair still perfectly coiffed even when doused in twenty remixes' worth of nightclub sweat.

“Greg, I'm stuck,” I yelled as the flow of people moved me farther up the stairs.

“Come dance!” Greg screamed, pointing downstairs as a posse of boys nudged him away.

“I said I'm stuck!” I screamed as the crowd took me higher. “I'll find you in a bit!”

“What?” he yelled again. All I could do was laugh as a sudden upward thrust pushed me farther up the staircase. I was trapped in the current, like a salmon during spawning season.

“I miss you!” I shouted.

“What?” Greg yelled, smiling as he begin to dissolve into the flock.

“I'll find you!” I screamed, gripping the banister to maintain my balance. “Just go dance!”

“What are you saying?” he yelled, only a sliver of his face visible through the crowd.

“I love you! Now go . . .”

And then he was gone, absorbed into the throng of bodies and onto the dance floor, where I'd imagined him for years.

It took me another few minutes to get to the third floor, a process made easier by simply surrendering to the gravitational pull around me. Upstairs I chugged a pint of water at the near-empty bar, feeling the muffled beat of the dance floor below vibrating in my feet. Above that thudding bass I heard a new sound. A familiar song emanated from the speakers at the end of the bar. Digital flutes and wah-wah guitars built to a crescendo as a glittering harp opened the sonic doors to a new world. As the Pet Shop Boys' “Being Boring” played I remembered that night four years ago when the idea that happiness was an option still scared the hell out of me; when the possibility of living and loving fully was still bound to my fears of isolation, rejection, and death. I pictured myself alone in that little room feeling like I'd disappointed my family and lost all my friends. Quietly, I hummed along to the lyrics in the second half of the song.

I never dreamt that I would get to be

The creature that I always meant to be

But I thought in spite of dreams

You'd be sitting somewhere here with me
.

I looked out the small, round attic window onto downtown San Antonio, a truly beautiful city at night. In the dark, its taco stands and pickup trucks and shopping malls all disappeared. It
looked like a galaxy, a beautiful cosmos of planets, stars, and constellations thousands of miles away.

This could be any city
, I thought, letting that feeling of anonymity wrap its arms around me like an old friend. And for a moment, the solitude was nice.

“We almost died on those stairs, huh?”

I turned from the window to see the red-shirted boy from the staircase standing above me.

“Um, yeah,” I answered as he sat down. He leaned forward and smiled, his eyes twinkling with reflections of the city out the window behind me.

“I'm Jack,” he said, extending his hand. I slipped my fingers around his, which somehow felt twenty degrees warmer than mine. A twinge of anxiety descended over me as we shook hands, holding on to each other a bit longer than two strangers really should. My brain was fumbling for the right words, and in that manic stillness I needed to escape. I wanted to become invisible, for just long enough to slip away from this handsome boy in black glasses. I wished, for just a moment, to shroud myself in my old uniform: a pair of pleated khakis and white sneakers with a simple button-down. But there I was in my moth-eaten T-shirt and torn jeans, smelling of patchouli, with studs in each ear, anything but invisible.

I took a deep breath and sighed, feeling the bass from the dance floor below in my bones.

As Jack held on to my hand, I was overcome with that feeling you get when you meet someone who seems familiar and you just know you're going to be good friends.

“Hi,” I answered. “My name's David.”