Fuckness (9 page)

By going by that area, brimming with those blobs in suits and their blobbish families, I figured I would be able to really get in touch with my anger. And I was starting to feel like I should be really angry, like back there at the house, but I didn’t really feel that way at all. A sort of serenity enshrouded itself around me. I just rolled along and looked up at the sky that was actually blue and at all those huge houses with happy people living in them.

Why couldn’t I have been born to one of them?

It was a tired, resigned thought, not full of any sort of anger. Only I knew it wouldn’t really have done me any good to be born there. I wouldn’t belong there any more than anywhere else and I knew they probably weren’t happier than anybody else. They were rich people with problems of their own, even if their problems were just blobbish inventions.

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, a feeling swept over me. It was the feeling that I should, at that point, decide who I wanted to be. I fought to resist the temptation. I knew there were several types of person to become. There were those who had material wealth. Those people living in the houses up on the hills in the near distance. But what did those people really have? They were the people who made their living by controlling other people’s lives. They made the rules, the policies—they hired and fired people. They decided whether or not the people below them would be eating in weeks to come. I didn’t think I could ever become like that. They were the human gods, the new breed of gods who built the new nature, the machines, something for the mere mortals to spend their days toiling with. No, I could never be a god.

Then there were others, people like Drifter Ken, who seemed perfectly content to live with nothing. Like all of their happiness came from the inside and how they treated people and all that Biblical kind of fuckness. I could kind of see myself being one of those people, if I could ever get rid of the giant waves of fuckness that seemed to wash over me on a daily basis. If the fuckness would just let me be, maybe I could be a little nicer to people. If I could exterminate the red crawlies. Nearly everyone has a desire to be successful and make money but, for people like me, I knew it didn’t happen that way.

There was, of course, a third class of people. The types of people that if I could have been I wouldn’t have chosen. This type of person never gives up. They’re not
allowed
to give up. They never rest to develop any kind of happiness on the inside because they are too busy trying to make money, trying to be one of the Clean People. So, not only do they not get to lead the life of expensive distraction, they also didn’t get to rest and enjoy life.

Most of all, I didn’t want to be one of those people who had no idea who they were. The type of person who would whither up and die if you gave them an empty room. Those malleable, blobbish souls who were so busy presenting the world with an image they thought the world wanted to see, that they forgot who they started out as. This type of person can be found in each of the above classes, no doubt.

After thinking that, I guess I really started wallowing in self-pity because I started thinking of all the mean things the parents had done to me and wondering if all that meant I
had
to be who I was. Like maybe I didn’t have to choose what type of person I should become because it was already chosen for me. For starters, the mother gave birth to me. And I was pretty sure my genes were somehow faulty because nobody acted like I did. Even the LD kids could go to their special classes and manage to go up to the next grade. I couldn’t get into those classes, though. All the tests said I was at least of average intelligence. That is, they said all of my problems were physical. Or that I chose to act the way I did. I was sure the parents had taken some pieces of the puzzle out of their respective boxes. Giving birth to me also meant I had to see them on a day to day basis.

And then there were the horrible punishments.

At first, they started out kind of subtle. I was certain, however much the parents denied it, that other kids’ parents bought clothes and all kinds of stuff for them. After I started failing, the parents didn’t even buy Christmas presents. They said presents cheapened the spirituality of Christmas. The parents had never struck me as very spiritual people and their lies blew up when I, on Christmas Eve one year, watched wide-eyed as they exchanged presents. Birthdays also went uncelebrated, one age sliding smoothly into the next. I doubted the parents even remembered when my birthday was. The punishments roughened in texture, growing more brutal and physical. But I kept focusing on this one thing. This one thing was what had made me finally decide Racecar was one of the blobbiest people in the world. In other words, if I hated Racecar, if that was what I was feeling, then this was the reason why.

Ever since I turned ten, it had been my job to mow the lawn. The yard was easy to mow, being equal parts grass and dirt, but the family had had the same lawnmower for as long as I could remember and something new would go wrong with this lawnmower every year. Racecar obviously couldn’t mow the grass unless he could find a way to strap a blade under that chair and when the lawnmower developed all those special tricks you had to know to operate it the mother decided it just wasn’t ladies’ work and that I was plenty old enough to start mowing it myself.

The only thing Racecar had to do was show me how to start it and turn it off. The pull cord that had come connected to it had been ripped off, so the father improvised with a piece of thick yellow rope that was knotted at both ends. To start it, he had to wrap this rope around some cylindrical thing at the top of the engine and pull. It took him about ten more pulls than it had before the pull cord was dislocated. To turn it off, you had to take hold of these two naked wires and touch them to this hot part of the engine and keep them held there until the damn thing sputtered to a stop. This seemed kind of dangerous because the lawnmower didn’t have a gas cap and the strenuously bucking exercise of starting it caused gas to slosh everywhere and, when you touched those wires to that metal, there were usually some sparks. I waited for that lawnmower to turn me into an instant burn victim. Then I would creep people out even more with my baby pink, eyebrowless face.

I stood beside him, both of us looking down at the gimpish lawnmower, a grime-covered gas can sitting beside it. Racecar made me bend down and wrap the rope around the top of the engine and hand the end of the rope to him.

“
Now all you gotta do is give it a yank.” He pulled violently up on the rope, his wheelchair shifting a little in the grass.

He pulled on the rope a few more times, getting more and more frustrated with each pull.

“
Now you try it, you little ass. A growing boy should be able to do more than an old cripple.”

I always hated it when he called himself a cripple. It made him sound so much more innocent than he really was.

I wrapped the rope around the top of the engine and gave it a yank, my hands slick with sweat. My right hand slipped off the rope, the back of my hand smacking Racecar in the forehead. I burst out laughing. I’m not sure whether it was the accidental cuffing or the laughter, but Racecar was furious. He snatched the rope off the lawnmower, grunted, and smacked me on the arm with the knot at the end of the rope.

I accidentally shouted, “Fuck,” and he belted me again on the other arm. That was the worst pain I’d ever felt at that time in my life. The pain was red hot and lingering. I imagined it felt like being hit by a bullet. Racecar rolled back to the house. I silently wished the uneven yard would pitch him out of his wheelchair. I told myself if that happened I would hover over him, sadistically belting him with that rope until he was a giant welt. Then I would dance around him singing a song I’d invented for just an occasion called, “I Got Legs and You Don’t.”

“
You’re on your own, you little shit, and you better have the whole fucking thing mowed before dark,” he called over his shoulder. To my disappointment, he made it to the house unpitched.

I managed to get the job done and, by the time I was finished, there was a giant purple knot painted on each of my arms. If it wasn’t for being able to rest them on the lawnmower’s handle, I don’t think I could’ve even kept them held up.

I didn’t know why that, of all things, had come to me on my day of escape and then I had an even crazier thought. I thought about that piece of shit lawnmower I’d never have to use again and that piece of rope, now blackened, that I always tied around the handle when I was finished and then I thought about that gas can and how the garage always smelled full of gas. I thought about what a dry day it was.

Then I had a truly awful idea. Sometimes thinking too much led me to those truly awful, ugly ideas.

The parents were already dead. I was already a murderer. Why should I give them the satisfaction of a decent burial? Why should any other blob think I was a murderer, that I hadn’t died right alongside them?

I was wrong when I thought I would never be going back to that house. I would go back this one last time, I told myself, and I wouldn’t even have to go inside.

I turned the wheelchair around and headed back home.

Chapter Eight

The Confession

Starting back home, and knowing full well what I planned to do, I decided I didn’t have the proper resources. I briefly thought about trying to use the sparks from the lawnmower but that would be noisy and there was the whole creepy burn victim thing. I would need matches or a lighter, any incendiary device would do, and I knew exactly where to go. I turned the wheelchair around. I started back the way I came, figuring that would kill more time. Right after I’d had the first ugly thought, another one blossomed, almost as bad as the first. Timing figured in heavily with the second idea. The parents would always be there but, after the second idea was fulfilled, I knew I would have to leave town. My work would be done. I’d only been out of the house for a couple hours and I was already starting to feel like a different person. My thoughts seemed clearer. From the usual low-grade whumming I never really noticed, another voice was making itself heard. Only it didn’t seem like a voice as much as it did a feeling, a tug, some form of direction.

I would start back the way I came, branching off near the house so I could go by the park and see Drifter Ken. I felt like I
had
to say bye to him. It seemed like he was one of the only people who’d ever been nice to me and I figured he was sure to have matches or a lighter. Something for the job.

On the way there, I thoroughly enjoyed the wheelchair. For a relatively lazy person like myself, it sure beat the hell out of walking. I just rolled right along in the crisp air and looked up at that blue sky and those nice old houses and if my head and neck weren’t so sore I could have thrashed around and had a great time thinking my thoughts. When you’re tall and gangly, sometimes you have to concentrate on walking. The wheelchair allowed me to listen to that new feeling, going where it told me to go. Until the discovery of the wheelchair, skipping had been my favorite mode of transportation because, when I skipped, I didn’t have time to think any thoughts at all and, most of the time, that was best. And, realistically, that would have been impossibly far to skip.

A few cars rolled past real slow. I could tell the people inside were staring at me. Hell, I would have stared too. It’s not every day you see someone, hideous under regular circumstances, with horns on his head. Like the horns drew attention to all the rotten fuckness below. I imagined them edging their holy cars over to the other side of the road because the horns said I was evil and they didn’t want anything to do with evil and rottenness. I was probably lucky it wasn’t the time of day when the cruel high schoolers were out cruising around. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to just go ahead and take the stupid things off. It was like there was something inside of me that wanted to be punished. I just kept my head down, trying not to make any eye contact.

When I first got to the park, I stayed behind the hedges. A cop was talking to Drifter Ken. Even though Drifter Ken didn’t normally talk about his problems, I’d heard him complain about the cops on a few occasions.

“
The cops in this here town.
Shit
. I’m just an ol man who likes to sit down on this here ol bench with compulsive regguhlarity and they always wanna give me shit about it.”

Drifter Ken was amazing. If it weren’t for that something inside of me, that feeling or calling or whatever, that thing that yelled at me and told me I had to get out of Milltown, I could have seen myself living with Drifter Ken. Well, the
living
part was kind of in question, since I wasn’t sure if he had a house or not. There was just something so unblobbish about him I knew we’d get along fine. Of course, there was always the possibility he would think I was a blob.

As I sat in my chair watching him talk to that cop, I could tell he was making the cop break up. I heard the cop laughing all the way over there in the bushes and, before walking away, he gave Drifter Ken a pat on the arm as if to say, “You keep em laughing, Drifter Ken.”

The cop got in his car and started up toward the school. I was far enough off the road to where he wouldn’t notice me. I didn’t even really stop to think I could be the person the cop was looking for. That would be one of the worst things in the world, a major setback, that cop dragging me back into the school. He would smile at Pearlbottom. A secret smile that said they were both members in the society of keeping kids’ lives joyless and free of fun. “I found a little piece of trash for yuh,” he’d say. “Didn’t know whether to take him here or straight back to hell.” No, I figured I was pretty safe. Who was going to harass a crippled boy, anyway?