Bad Kid (9 page)

“Here's the best part,” Johnny said, punching a button on the dash.

As the top of the car opened over our heads, we looked up to the cloudless sky. Greg started the car and popped our favorite cassette into the Cabriolet's stereo system. Book of Love's “Boy” blasted from speakers all around us.

“Those are special subwoofers you're listening to, boys,” yelled Johnny over the mirror-rattling bass.

“Yeah!” Greg screamed, hugging me as the lead singer cooed the lyric “I want to be where the boys are . . .” We bounced up and down in the seat midhug, knowing that our days of almost dying before first period were over.

“You fags are too much,” Johnny said, patting me on the back with a smile. The word sounded different than it had before. And as I hugged Greg, listening to
our
music in
our
car in
our
driveway, I felt a little more like someone's brother.

Here's Greg and me during our sophomore year shortly after we moved into a more New Wave aesthetic; lots of vests and hair gel during this phase. I believe we're each wearing matching ankh charms at the end of those homemade, black yarn necklaces. Our favorite lunchtime offerings were these scalding-hot hamburgers that were microwaved in their own plastic packaging. Greg's excitement over his burger might explain his look of surprise here. I'm surprised we allowed ourselves to be photographed during lunch. Eating was never very goth.

F
uckin' wake up!” yelled Johnny, wet and naked, holding a balled-up towel over his crotch. “This fucking phone rang off the hook until I had to get out of the fucking shower,” he screamed, shoving a cordless phone into my face before snapping Greg with his towel.

“Jerk!” Greg murmured, wincing in pain as he woke up.

“Excuse me,” my mother asked through the receiver.

“Mom? What's wrong?” I asked.

“David. Your father's here to pick you up,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

I'd forgotten that we were spending Super Bowl Sunday at my grandparents' house.

“Tell me the address,” my dad barked in the background.

I quickly washed my armpits and scrubbed my face to prepare for his arrival, trying to look awake in spite of the three hours of sleep I'd gotten. I went into panic mode, combing the dried gel out of my hair and pacing the bedroom.

“Greg, I need normal clothes. Please! Something for church.”

I looked at the options Greg laid out on his bed, the comb shaking in my hand.

“David, it's okay. What's wrong?”

“I just don't want him to be mad,” I said, looking out the window as I put on Greg's khakis. “We're going to be twenty minutes late because of me!”

“
David, why don't you stay here? Say you're sick or . . .”

A car horn honked. We looked through the window at my dad in the brown truck outside, his jaw locked tight, knuckles flexed around the steering wheel. He slowly turned his head until his laser-beam gaze stopped on us. Greg flinched away from the window.

“God, David. He looks . . . mad.”

I hugged Greg tightly and whispered, “He's mad a lot.”

My dad and I spent the first part of our fifteen-minute ride in nerve-racking silence. Over the hum of the engine I could hear his teeth grinding against one another. Each red light or delayed exit lane seemed like the final straw, the thing that would push him over the edge.

Every turn, brake, and acceleration was loaded with the possibility of a confrontation. One that would make me sink slowly against the car door, trying to become a puddle that would evaporate in the sheer, blazing heat of my father's anger.

“Why weren't you at your house and ready?” he asked as we arrived.

“I forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Yeah, Dad. Sorry.”

“We'll see if I forget
you
the next time we make plans,” he said, braking hard in front of my grandparents' house. “Now tuck your shirt in.” He got out and walked into the yard. “Hurry up, dammit.”

“Sorry,” I said, fumbling with the seat belt. “I'm coming. Sorry.”

My grandparents had lived in the same pink brick house since before I was born. The garage was a storage area, its walls mounted with taxidermied animal heads that had terrified me for years. A glass jar of dust-covered peppermints sat on the coffee table, untouched since the early eighties. The bathroom was still decorated with the little mermaid figurines I'd given names and told secrets to when I was a little boy. My grandfather sat where he'd been for as long as I could remember: in a beige La-Z-Boy recliner with a television remote in his lap.

“Well hello, stranger,” he said, surrounded by a dozen relatives drinking iced tea out of mason jars.

“Sorry we're late,” my dad said over the television, shooting me a sideways glance.

“Oh, don't you worry about a thing,” my grandmother Oggy said, covering us in salmon-colored-lipstick kisses. “Come out back, y'all. We're about to have venison and chalupas.”

The large group moved out to the backyard to have lunch before the game. A massive ten-point buck hung from an oak tree by its hind legs, its chest and stomach splayed open. The men gathered on one side of the deer to listen to my grandfather tell the gory, detailed story of its murder. The women sat in rusty
metal chairs around a picnic table on the other side of the deer, discussing their recipes. I straddled the space between the two until my aunt Jean called me over. At first it was a relief. But as my grandmother brought out her famous chalupas, the interrogation began.

“So tell us about all the girls you're driving wild!” said my cousin Janet. “You're so handsome, David. You must have a gal!”

The questions continued as I pigged out on venison, knowing that having a full mouth would give me time to consider my answers carefully. I chewed slowly, hoping a cousin would interrupt or my grandmother would ask for help in the kitchen or the deer would fall from its branch and crush me to death in front of my entire family.

“My neighbor's daughter would love you,” winked Janet as cousin Sharla added, “I teach a girl named Robin you should meet.”

I wanted to remind them that I was a teenage boy, not a forty-year-old divorcé. As the ladies squawked and gossiped, I looked up into the dripping, scarlet rib cage of the dead creature overhead. With my mouth full of what used to be its body, I thought,
Why can't I be you right now? Swinging in the breeze without a care in the world? Hanging dead from a tree with no one obsessively questioning your burgeoning sexuality?

An hour later we moved inside to prepare for the game, the women cleaning up in the kitchen while the men gathered in the living room. A half dozen beer cans popped open as the TV screen lit up with crowd shots of painted faces and giant foam fingers. I had no interest in football, choosing instead to hang out with Oggy and her gals. In the kitchen we'd gab about Bat
Boy, UFOs, and whatever else had piqued her interest in the latest issue of
Globe
magazine or the
National Enquirer
. But as I moved into the kitchen, my father stopped me.

“DJ, why don't you stay in here and watch the game?”

I sat down on the couch and watched the pregame coverage as a great-uncle and a second cousin slipped into coma-like slumbers. My cousin Brett started to rail against the Buffalo Bills as my cousin Fred decried the New York Giants.

“They're all damn Yankees,” my grandfather interrupted, holding the remote up to the screen to turn up the volume. “What the heck does it matter?”

My dad exhaled loudly. I cringed at the thought that my grandfather's behavior could be another reason for my dad to be upset on the ride home, when it would be just him and me. My grandfather cleared his throat and lowered the remote onto his lap with a quivering hand.

“Bring me some more tea!” he yelled to my grandmother in the kitchen.

Dutifully, she brought him his tea, sneaking me a grin on her way back to the kitchen. As retirees fell asleep all around me, I became transfixed by the pregame interviews on the television. Chiseled, meaty jaws flexed and forearm muscle striations danced as thick-necked Yankee men of various ethnicities discussed the game. As my cousin Bill's sleeping head slumped against my shoulder, the camera lingered on a player's rounded buttocks, the ghostly belt of a jockstrap visible through his sheer spandex tights. I tried to focus on the ladies in the kitchen talking about an endoscopy and then on the deer carcass swinging outside and then on the myriad of black fillings in my sleeping cousin's open mouth, but nothing worked. My grandfather
began to snore. The only other conscious person in the room was my father. There I was again, trapped with a rock-hard, brain-burning erection in a small space with my dad.

“I'll be back.”

I burst from the room with incredible speed, knowing that the faster I moved, the better chance I had of hiding the lump below my belt. I slammed the bathroom door and dropped my pants, a multiethnic Rolodex of rippling biceps and bulging athletic cups dancing through my head. I unzipped my pants, trying not to think about the pastel bathroom full of
Reader's Digest
s and tubes of Icy Hot, but the inappropriate contrast only made me harder. Thirty seconds later I could feel it rising up in me—that wonderful building of staticlike electricity moving into the tops of my thighs and then higher, centering itself and expanding like a magnificent supernova. I heard a faint ceramic knocking that was getting louder. I realized it was the toilet seat moving back and forth against my shins in rhythm with my strokes. As my knees buckled I bit my lip, muting myself as an amazing rush took control of my body. I opened my eyes just in time to see myself ejaculate all over my favorite mermaid's smiling porcelain face.

“DJ. It's starting,” my dad yelled.

I looked around at my grandparents' things: my grandfather's plastic shower seat, my grandmother's giant canister of Final Net hairspray, the tiny tray on the toilet tank packed with geriatric prescriptions. I'd just pleasured myself in their bathroom while imagining complete sexual annihilation at the hands of the Buffalo Bills. I wiped my semen off the tiny face of the magical sea creature I'd whispered to as a three-year-old and felt utterly ashamed.

I zipped up my gay pants and washed my gay hands, avoiding my gay reflection on the way out. In the living room, I was met with an explosion of applause. For a split second I feared that my fantasy football orgy in the bathroom hadn't been as private as I'd thought. But the applause was coming from the television, where a stadium of people was exploding with cheers as a tiny black woman in a white tracksuit began to sing, “Ooo-oooh say, can you seeee . . .”

Whitney Houston belted out the national anthem with more passion, skill, and grace than I'd ever heard. The camera zoomed in on her face, tears welling up in her eyes. The crowd sat hypnotized in quiet, dumbfounded reverie. Whitney's voice was like a siren. As she sang, I could feel something familiar rising up in me: a staticlike electricity moving through my belly, into my lungs, and then higher, centering itself and expanding like a magnificent supernova in my chest. Her gaze rose skyward as she belted out the final note, her expression signifying a kind of hearty thanks as well as a pleading desperation. Watching this beautiful girl with black skin who looked nothing like previous Super Bowl singers, I was reminded that I was free, but that maybe I could be even freer. And maybe I deserved it.

As a wave of applause erupted from the stadium, a silence fell over the living room. A dozen of us stared, wide-eyed and awake, at the television.

“Hmm. That nigger can sing.”

My grandfather sat in his chair, arms crossed, staring into the screen with dull, bored eyes.

“Anyone hungry for pie?” asked my grandmother halfheartedly.

Almost everyone walked into the kitchen for dessert, leaving my father, my grandfather, and me alone with the static hiss of the roaring stadium. My dad looked at me with sad, concerned eyes that seemed to say,
Are you okay? Does it hurt? I love you
,
son
.

As he patted me on the shoulder and left the room, I wondered how it must feel to be that distant from your own father. Then I shuddered at the possibility of one day finding out, albeit for different reasons.

I sat in silence with my grandfather as giant, glistening men ran back and forth across the screen, so many men I wasn't allowed to want. I wondered if that pink brick house was really where I was meant to be. I hoped not, but the back pages of
Interview
magazine suddenly seemed like they were more than a few states away. Those photos were surely taken on a planet in some other galaxy. And on my planet, in this galaxy, inhabited by these people, I knew that I could be only so free.

Staring at the television, my grandfather let out a long exhale and asked, “So, David. How's the girl situation?”