Fuckness (13 page)

“
You okay in there?” the father called, on his way into the living room.

I gave a response that the dry mouth and nausea turned into something like, “Yeeung.”

“
Hang in there.”

“
Tell me what they’re doing out there.”

He wheeled himself over to the window, pulling back the clean white curtains the mother had bought at the Dollar General.

“
The cunts are leaving,” he said.

I sat up.

“
Really?”

“
S’what it looks like.”

“
They gone yet?”

“
Getting in the car.”

The mother came in and shut the door. She leaned against it, throwing her weight against the world that could so easily penetrate it. A huge smile spread across her face.

“
They’re closing the case,” she said.

The father hung his head. He was crying, his muscled arms trembling as he clutched the wheels of his chair.

“
Does that mean I won’t be going anywhere?”

“
You’re staying right here, baby.”

That was the feeling. It flooded me. Over the past few weeks everything had seemed dark and depressing. Everywhere I looked, something else was flawed. My behavior wasn’t right, despite the straight ‘A’s. But, in that moment, everything became bright. Everything became right. Energy rushed through my body. I couldn’t help smiling. If I smiled like that now, I’d think I was an idiot, but then it was just the smile of a child. The smile of a creature who didn’t have a care in the world, a creature who
shouldn’t
have a care in the world.

The next few days I had walked around suppressing my laughter. I wanted to laugh at everyone and everything. I felt giddy.

Someone, if not those Clean People that came to the house, then the Clean People who called them, had figured the parents weren’t doing a good enough job of turning me into a blob and they wanted to take me away from the parents, reckoning they could do it right. I wanted them to see me after they left, not the idiot sad child who refused to speak but the smiling, confident, fully-hydrated child who was willing to ramble endlessly about the talents of any major league baseball team or the Top 40 charts.

That’s the way I felt as I left that school. I wanted to laugh at everything, even my own condition, trudging down the road with those ridiculous horns on top of my head. I wanted them to see me, all those faceless blobs that had made the last few years of my life a living hell. No, I didn’t want them to see me at all. I wanted them to go away and that’s what I imagined. I imagined all those shapeless, colorless masses melting into the ground, into the rotten soot and shit-covered earth that created them.

Feeling a second wind, I picked my speed up again and started back into a slow trot. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck them all—the thought meshed with my footsteps as I struggled not to fall down.

Chapter Twelve

Elf

I continued to trudge along by the side of the road, careful not to twist my ankle where the asphalt disintegrated into the grass. The landscape of Ohio is as erratic and temperamental as the weather. One mile, I was back there near all the factories and fuckness, miles of dingy brick and rusted iron, all coughing up into the sky. Now I was in relative countryside. The only houses were way back off the road. Soon I would be in relative filth again, in the Tar District. The Tar District’s factories were much smaller and older than the ones in Milltown proper. They made things like paper and rubber and didn’t have contracts with places like General Motors. Milltown kind of slouches down toward the Saints River, the Tar District, and I could see all that smoke against the deepening blue of the spring sky.

Behind me, the dark clouds were still rumbling and rolling, threatening to consume me. I slowed down and started thinking about a place to hide from the inevitable driving rains. There’s a popular saying in Ohio that goes: “If you don’t like the weather, stick around for about ten minutes and it’ll change.” If this storm had come a day earlier, it would have been snow. Today, it was nearly sixty before the clouds rolled over and the rain and wind would drop it to nearly freezing.

There weren’t a lot of places to hide out there. I was kind of looking for a barn or something, but there weren’t any in sight. I didn’t think it would be such a good idea to run into the woods if there was going to be lightning. I still had that weightless feeling and I wasn’t quite ready for God to strike me down just yet.

Fuck it, I thought. I didn’t care about the storm a half an hour ago, so why the hell should I care now.

The fuckness was going to come. No matter how I combated it, the fuckness would come. The harder I fought, the worse it would be. Hadn’t I battled fuckness enough for the day? Why not just let it land right on top of me?

I went over to the yellow grass beside the road and threw myself on the ground. I rolled over on my back and looked up at the sky. I liked the way the sky looked before a storm as much as I did at dawn or sunset. The colors were just as vibrant but they were darker—blue, gray, black. It was the type of thing I imagined bumpkins doing, lying there musing up at the sky except, in the classical image of this, it was usually a clear blue day, possibly sparkling, huge fluffy white clouds floating slowly across the sky. How many times was that said in the country, I wondered? “Look at the fluffy white clouds. Look at heaven floating by in the sky.” I wondered what life would have been like if we’d never left Farmertown. We didn’t have a farm or any fuckness like that but our house was a lot nicer and the school seemed a lot less violent and everything else didn’t seem so threatening either.

I was sure of one thing—if the Clean People had taken me that day, things wouldn’t have turned out any better. When I was in the sixth grade at Clinton Elementary, there was a new kid there. The elementary was small enough so whenever there was a new kid who showed up, everyone knew right away who they were. Everyone called this kid Elf because he was so much smaller than the other kids were and his ears were sort of abnormally pointed. Like a lot of losers did, we started talking to each other because no one else would give us the time of day.

The family had lived in Milltown since I was in the second grade and I had yet to meet a big enough loser to call a friend. I was in sixth grade before Elf came along. And I couldn’t really say that Elf was a friend. Losers always have kind of shaky relationships, especially when they’re adolescents, which pretty much puts them in the same category as a sociopath. Like they just spend time together until something better comes along, avoiding any real emotional attachments. For instance, I can’t remember Elf’s real name. He probably wouldn’t remember my name at all.

Anyway, Elf had been through one of those blobbification programs. He was actually taken out of his home. The people who took him away from his folks though, he didn’t call them the Clean People. He said his father called them the Ringmasters. Elf really didn’t find out why he was taken out of the house until he went to live with the new people. They had told Elf how glad he should be to be living with them.

Apparently, his real parents didn’t send him to school. I always thought that was weird because Elf was probably the smartest kid in the sixth grade. It sounded like Elf’s real parents were fantastic. He couldn’t stand the new parents. They already had three kids of their own and didn’t really pay any attention to Elf. He said they only took him in so they could get paid for it. They left most of the discipline up to their oldest son, who would lock Elf in a closet just for the hell of it. Just like I had imagined, Elf was their pet, something cute and new for the family to fawn over for a few weeks until they realized he had needs like every other living thing.

Elf’s real mother stayed home all day with Elf and they had their own school, without the distractions of the other kids. The most fantastic thing was that Elf’s dad was a professional clown. Elf said his dad thoroughly enjoyed being a clown. Sometimes he wouldn’t change his clothes when he came home from clowning. In fact, sometimes when his dad came home, Elf and his mother would dress like clowns before they all sat down to dinner. Elf’s dad told him the only thing funnier than watching a clown was actually being a clown. Elf enjoyed dressing like a clown but he still had more fun watching his dad. Elf said dressing like a clown made him feel like he had to perform, like he was somehow obligated to entertain his parents. Like I said, Elf was the smartest kid I knew. These were the things Elf talked about. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he could have been lying to me. Not about his being taken from his parents, I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth about that, but what his parents were actually like before he was taken away.

The new parents had also told Elf that his old house was a complete and total wreck. Elf said he was upset when he had to leave the house because, ever since he was able to pick up a crayon, the parents had let him draw on the walls. Just before he was taken away, Elf was heavy into magazines and was working on a giant collage in his bedroom. Even in the sixth grade, Elf could see that the walls of his house were going to be his life’s work. Until being yanked out, he said he felt like that was what he was chosen to do.

About the other messes, Elf said his dad couldn’t understand the point of putting anything back when you were just going to be getting it right back out. Shelving merely eliminated the wall space, which was invaluable for Elf’s artistic endeavors. If they decided they didn’t want something anymore, they would set it out on the curb for someone else to take. Also, through the week, they just threw all their trash out the backdoor and made this big pile. At the end of the week they would rake it all up and burn it. Elf’s dad told him if they put all their stuff in the trashcan it would eventually just be buried into the earth. Elf’s dad also had a hatred of trashbags. He said if humans weren’t careful, they would find themselves living on a giant trashbag.

If there was one thing I didn’t like about Elf, it was that he talked about himself too much. I would rather have
known
he was making everything up. While he knew virtually nothing about me, I had a firm handle on his life history. But I liked Elf. It’s always seemed like everyone has annoyed me in some way or the other.

One day at school, Elf talked about running away. I think Elf had seen too many movies. He seemed to think he would be able to go to some large city and be taken in by some fabulously rich family who had always wanted a child. He said he wanted to go to New York. He’d heard that was where you could paint and get paid for it. Also, a lot of the trains that came through Milltown had elaborate spraypainted designs on them. He said if no one would
buy
his paintings then he would be perfectly happy spraypainting those trains and maybe walls and subways also. He said it would be like starting his life’s work over again except, this way, the whole country would be able to see it. It always amazed me how serious Elf was. Lying there beside the road and waiting for those black clouds to break over my body, I didn’t have any more plans or ideas than I did on that sixth grade playground talking to Elf. The next day, after telling me about running away, he wasn’t at school. I never saw him again. I hoped he made it to New York. I hoped he was able to make it. I hoped he was able to make himself weightless enough to do whatever it was he wanted to do.

I never told anyone he had mentioned running away, not even the mother and father. When I thought about that, I wondered if Elf wasn’t a rent-a-kid. That’s what happens to the children the social services take. They don’t always put them up for adoption into good homes. That usually only happened to babies. An older child was usually put into foster care, rented out. And maybe Elf
knew
he was like a book that had lain around the house too long. Maybe he knew he was going back to the library and decided to make it sound romantic and grand. No doubt the orphanages were just like a library. When a book first comes out, there is a waiting list for it. Two years later, people will deny they’d ever read the thing in the first place.

Even though that was most probably the truth, Elf’s present parents simply returning him after they’d paid off the mortgage on the house or something, I didn’t want to believe it. I realized that, more than anything, more than the fuckness or the parents or miserable little Milltown Middle, I was tired of reality. Maybe everything outside of reality was a lie but, lying there on the ground, I realized I needed all those fantasies. I needed Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I needed to believe the movies were just like real life. I needed to believe people weren’t judged by how much money they made or how much schooling they’d had. I needed to believe the moon was made of cheese. Maybe I even needed to believe the parents were always right and maybe I even needed a God to pray to.

Maybe I needed it or maybe I needed to deny it all. There was a rip somewhere in the middle of my body or my brain—half of it said I needed to believe everything and the other half said I shouldn’t believe any of it. Was it a breakdown? That’s what it felt like except I thought of it as more of a meltdown. Like everything that had ever been said to me, everything I’d ever done, every feeling I’d ever felt—all pressed down on me. I felt it enter my skin and crawl around in my veins. I felt all the fuckness beating a tattoo against my bones.