Lawnboy (18 page)

Hector and I were silent for a time, watching my brother work. He might have been reassuring himself. I felt hungry, diminished. I was certain of it, then: I wanted Hector as much as I wanted anything.

I didn’t take Peter’s discomfort to heart. If anything, I felt myself becoming more and more adventurous in the weeks that followed. It was as if I’d thrown up my hands to the fear of judgment and censure. I was tired—once and for all—of reigning myself in, toning myself down. So I assembled a look. I wore faded black T-shirts with the sleeves hacked off. I wore a battered silver motorcycle jacket (borrowed from Hector) whenever the temperature dropped. I even grew accustomed to my crew cut, buzzing it short every Friday night whether it needed it or not. It seemed that I was gradually becoming my look, and I felt snappier, more streamlined and self-assured than I had in seven years, when for a brief period I’d gone through my Ozzy Osbourne phase. I was changing, crumbling, slipping away right before my very eyes. It was nothing but a relief to me. So what if I looked like a big old homo?

The truth was I’d been wanting to assume another look for years, but hadn’t pursued it for fear of seeming false, pretentious, of falling flat on my face. But wasn’t that part of the fun? Wasn’t that what was interesting about other self-created people, the visible cracks in the armor? It seemed that all I needed was a sense of humor, a dash of smarts, and I could be whoever I wanted. What was a lifetime but a series of shifting, inter-changeable masks? I could look like a biker boy today, and tomorrow a trust accountant, and the next day a geeky scientist.

I stopped before the mirror every time I passed it.
“Grrrrr,”
I growled, flexing my muscles.

What I didn’t comprehend was that my dressing up could concern Peter so much. It wasn’t that he’d directly addressed the issue. It wasn’t that he told me to tone it down for fear that I’d put off our guests. Instead, he made his feelings known in the way he talked around everything but the clothes on my back. Maybe he was taking on the role of Sid and Ursula, feeling it his duty to keep me in line, to inspire inhibition in a personality he perceived to be reckless and underdeveloped. Or was it that my dressing this way—let’s face it: hypermasculine, yet daffy—reminded him of something that scared him about himself? He certainly should have recognized he’d constructed his own look. No one wore chinos and button-downs and wire-frame glasses day after day without some degree of intention, without knowing he desired to communicate a sensibility, a point of view to the outer worlds. But was he ready to admit that? I thought now of his earlier warning about Hector the night we’d stumbled upon each other in the sample house. In the days that followed, his silence started to pique me. He made me want to dress more and more outlandishly, to tattoo my back, to pierce my eyebrow, to dye my stubbled hair aqua, cranberry—a new color depending upon the week and season.

Deep down, I wondered whether Peter was simply frightened of the confidence that had been gradually inhabiting me. Did he want some for himself? It seemed to me that he both wanted some and was afraid all at the same time, but what did I know? I’d found a way to
be
in the world, a way of letting go, abandoning myself within a certain set of parameters. It was like learning how to eat with a knife and fork. I thought about Sid, his social cluelessness and fear of outsiders. I thought about his flirtations with his female coworkers, how it was endlessly getting him into trouble, baffling him every time he was called upon it. “I never meant any harm,” he’d say. “I’m not a bad guy. I only love women.” He might have come from another planet, another century. He simply didn’t know the rules, as if he were navigating, rudderless, through a storm-drenched sea. You had to know the rules. It might have been foolish, mistaken to crave something fixed, but it made it easier, I knew that much, and I wasn’t prepared to unlearn anything I’d taught myself.

Hector and I were hosing down the lounge chairs by the pool. A girl with thick glasses and a homemade brown dress was sitting by the gate, reading about plankton in an ancient volume of
The World Book.
She peered up at us occasionally, pretending she wasn’t watching.

“By the way,” Hector said. “I have some good news for you.”

I looked up. A star-shaped patch of cleaning fluid foamed beneath his lip.

“You know Alejandro?”

“From Fort Lauderdale? The tax accountant?”

He nodded. The banana palms creaked above our heads. “He wants to go out with you. He thinks your new look’s really cute.”

“Great,” I said, more blandly than I’d intended. I thought of Alejandro, his aviator glasses, his slicked-back hair, the pleasing squirrely sleaziness of him. In exchange for services, he was given a free room, and he stayed here once a month, sunning himself by the pool in a micro-black bikini. He was sexier to me than I was willing to admit, but that wasn’t what was irking me. It was Hector’s detached, off-handed manner I didn’t like: he sounded like a pimp.

“He actually said something very nice about you.”

The girl looked up from her encyclopedia. Her name—Mary Grace—was markered on the olive cover.

“He did?” I said.

“He thought that you possessed a really interesting combination of butch and femme. He thought that that was a sign of an interesting, complex personality.”

“But he doesn’t even know me.”

He shrugged, then tossed his sponge on a chair.

I followed him down the walkway. We were sitting on the floor of Hector’s room, flipping through his collection of drawings—“cameos,” he called them—derived from the covers of women’s detective novels of the 1950s. They were surprisingly good, though I paid little attention to them. The skin of my chest itched. In my usual habit, I was only gradually becoming aware of the fact that I was harboring any rage.

“What’s this talk about femme?” I blurted. “That’s ridiculous. I mean, do I look
femme?
”

Hector raised his brows. “Say what?”

“I’m talking about Alejandro, what he said about me. You acted like that was a compliment or something.”

Hector’s eyes went blank. He remained silent for a second, then scooted over to the night table. He fumbled for something in the drawer. Not two seconds later he yanked back my scalp violently, with full force, hurting me. “Hold still, butch boy.”

“What are you doing?” I cried.

He gripped the lipstick in his free hand, wielding it as if it were a scalpel. He began pressing the tube directly to my mouth.

“What the fuck?” I said, trying to push him toward the wall. He was even stronger than I’d imagined. “I told you I’d look bad as a girl.”

“No one talks to
me
like that.” And then he strayed from the outlines of my mouth, applying bars of lipstick across my jaw, my cheeks, my forehead, my hair.

I reached for his T-shirt on the floor and wiped off my face with it. I tossed it away. Its fabric was red, ruined.

“I’ll get you in drag,” he said with a cool, casual smugness. “Just you wait. I’ll dress you up if it’s the last thing I do.”

“That’s what you think,” I muttered.

“Girl,” he said, taunting me.

“Girl,”
I said, taunting him back.

I’d had about all I could stand from him. But coupled with that was another more affronting, alarming thought: he’d probably get me to do it, the jerk. I stared at his handsome, arrogant, self-satisfied face. I could have killed him.

***

At thirteen, I was afraid of someone. I did everything possible to distinguish myself from him. I recorded my voice over and over, imagining wide flat stones on my tongue, working out the inflections, sanding over any last traces of hiss. I trudged back and forth down the length of our driveway, taking heavy, self-assured steps, bouncing just slightly from the knees until my arms swung naturally, without concentration. I did push-ups by the dozen on the laundry-room floor. I read sports page after sports page, memorizing the scores, insinuating myself into arguments in which the merit of the Marlins’ MVP was in question. There was nothing helpless about me. You could say that I talked too much, that I was scattered and lacked focus, that I hungered for overwhelming amounts of attention and reassurance from everyone who came into contact with me, but you wouldn’t have said that I was feminine—that much I was sure.

Unlike Stan Laskin. Stan Laskin: hardware-store owner. Stan Laskin: who paid special attention to me every time I was sent in by Sid to buy switches or ten-penny nails. It wasn’t that he was anything but kind. It was that his body, his entire self-presentation, soft and yielding, with its tendency toward flab, represented everything I didn’t want to be. His colognes scented the atmosphere every time I waited at his counter. His glasses, all seven pairs of them, coordinated with his bracelets and rings. But most disturbing of all was the expression on his face, wounded and lamb-like, as if he were waiting for some devastating stranger to come through the door.

As far as I knew he lived alone and had never been loved by anyone in his life. His days, I decided, were repetitive, dull, and lonely, enlivened only by occasional visits to the fabric store, where he remembered all the employees’ birthdays, and to the public bathroom stall where he sat six hours at a time before a vacant glory hole. After work, he’d walk through his front door, leaving his outer life behind, assuming a secret role, draping himself in chintz or black velvet, before giving hairdos to his Yorkshires or trying on his extensive collection of cloches and pins. Every morning he’d call up his mother, discussing the trip they were planning to the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido, California. His life had as much to do with my own as the newsletter of the Siegfried and Roy fan club.

It was a warm, overcast day in December, the weekend before Christmas. A heat wave was descending upon Dade County, moistening the foliage with dew. In Florida fashion, the trunks of the royal palms were wrapped with strings of clear lights. I hurried down the Miracle Mile with Mark Margolit and Steve Mendelsohn, two of my friends from school. At least I thought they were friends. I cared about them as much as I cared about the health of my gums, but to one another we looked like friends, and when the three of us were together no one dared make fun of us. I felt convincing with them. They believed me when I expressed my interest in Jane. Together, we talked about the color and texture of Jamaica Reed’s nipples, the lead guitar solos from Metallica’s second album, and the afterschool activities of Mrs. Walgreen, our Spanish teacher, who was forever tugging her miniskirt down over her hips. I wore a ripped Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt with black kohl eyeliner around my eyes, and when I looked in the mirror I even scared myself.

We walked around the perimeter of the circle, the scent of frozen pizza still rising from our fingers, stumbling to the video arcade, where we’d play a few games of Donkey Kong or Burger Time. In my thirteen-year-old way, I’d told myself I was having fun and was behaving like any boy my age was supposed to. We couldn’t have been walking more than ten seconds when I saw Stan Laskin carrying boxes between a rental truck and his store, accepting a delivery. He looked relatively conventional for Stan Laskin: baggy chino pants, golden horn-rims, navy blue button-down. Except for the scrap of material—a yellow brocaded print tied around his throat. A softness slid down inside my stomach. I felt nothing but embarrassed and afraid.

“Nice scarf,” Steve said.

He wouldn’t look at us. He lifted up a box marked screwdrivers, watching it fall through his hands.

“Did you always like women’s accessories?” Steve said.

A single drop of sweat ran down the crease of my back.

“In case you’re interested,” Stan Laskin said, his face the deepest crimson, “it’s an ascot.”

“Oh, an ascot,” Steve said, highlighting his S. “An
ass
—cot.”

“We better get out of here,” I whispered to Mike.

“No,” Steve said. “Stay.” A brutal, joyous laugh tore up from his lungs. He leapt toward the stop sign and slapped its red metal face.

“Do you like to suck cock?” he said, spinning around, turning to Stan.

Nothing. A helicopter beat somewhere overhead, concealed.

“Do you? Do you like the taste of cock in your mouth?”

Stan gazed downward at the box in his hands.

“Faggot,” Steve said. “Lousy cocksucking faggot.”

The sidewalk might have cracked beneath my feet. More than anything I wanted Stan to dismiss us, to write us off as small, inconsequential. Instead, he turned not to Steve, but to me. He looked into my face in a more searching way than anyone ever had.

“What made you so hateful?” he said matter-of-factly.

“Me?” I said.

“All of you. I don’t get it. Tell me how you live with yourselves.”

Something bony and sharp pushed deep inside my chest.

“Come on,” Steve said. “I’ve had enough. Let’s check out those bitches across the street.”

The days hastened toward Christmas. I completed my activities as usual: I tossed Milk Duds to Delaware, our neighbor’s Boston terrier, in my efforts to teach her how to fetch. I worked through all the supplementary exercises in my algebra packet, achieving a 98 on the pop quiz. I even helped Peter wax my father’s Grand Prix, buffing its blue finish with a chamois cloth. At night, though, lying in bed, I couldn’t scour Stan’s question from my thoughts. I tried to tell myself that what had transpired hadn’t been so sad. Everyone behaved that way, everyone I knew. It wasn’t like they meant any harm. It was the way you carried yourself in the world. Otherwise, they’d pulverize you. Faggot, cocksucker, queer: these were just words—empty, stupid, meaningless words. No one needed to be defended here.

What the hell was I afraid of?

I was standing in the locker room after gym class. We were midway through the swimming unit, the only sport I could bear. Nearly everyone had already left for homeroom. The air smelled of bleach and worn elastic. I looked from side to side, pulled down my gym shorts, as the spray pounded in the shower room beside me. I turned halfway. It was Jon Brainard, a small, intense boy with blue eyes and dark curly hair, who’d just transferred from Sarasota. He was watching me beneath the showerhead, defined fingers lathering a compact stomach. He might have been my brother in another time. My skin tingled, chilled, then flushed with the richest warmth. He was rinsing the suds between his legs. I couldn’t keep myself from staring back, though I wanted to stop.