Screamscapes: Tales of Terror (21 page)

He looked at me like he wanted to kill me. For a minute, I almost thought he might take a swing at me. Instead, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Maybe I have, Stephen. Maybe I have a girlfriend and we have sex a lot. Maybe I had sex with her last night. How would you know?”

I thought about this. It didn’t take long.

“Well, Joe, I know because you are a nard, and nards don’t have sex with anyone but themselves and other nards. It’s like a law of nature, or something,” I said. “And besides, your shoe is untied.”

He didn’t even bother to look. I had probably pulled that trick on him one time too many.

“I don’t think sex is the most important thing, Stephen. It’s whether or not you love someone, whether or not you find them smart and stimulating, someone who gives you a reason to get up every day. I think that’s what’s most important,” Joe said, sounding like a total idiot, as usual.

“Smart girls? Really, Joe-peeing?” I said. “
Smart girl
usually means ‘ugly girl’, in my experience. Myself, I prefer dumb girls. Their expectations are lower because of their limited imaginations. Also, they’re easier to manipulate so I can control the relationship, which feeds my ego and makes me feel like God.”

“Well if you’re such an expert, maybe you could tell me about the last time you slept with a woman? Perhaps I could learn something,” Joe said, and crossed his arms waiting for me to answer, challenging me.

Really? The Nard is questioning my sexuality? I’m sure crossing a black cat’s path was the closest this guy has ever gotten to a real pussy.

It
had
been a long time since I had got me some snatch myself, come to think of it, but I couldn’t let him know that. In fact, the last time I even got stinkfinger was tenth grade when Jesse May, a chick with Downs or something, maybe just inbred, made the mistake of sitting next to me on the back of the bus. They said she was retarded, but those titties weren’t retarded, that’s for sure.

I tried to think up a story real quick, about me banging some snootch that would sound remotely plausible, but I’d been so tied up with my game practice the only pink I’d seen lately were porno cartoons of princess Zelda.

The Nard realized that I was stalling, so I decided to deflect him with a joke.

“Your mama,” I said. “I fucked her last night while you were in your bedroom beating off to magazines. You didn’t hear us? I’m surprised, because only a total dick-for-brains wouldn’t have heard their mom getting reamed five ways to Friday last night.”

I think that must have really gotten to him, because he turned pale when I told him I fucked his mama. He choked on his coke and a little bit dripped out of his nose as he sputtered it up.

He turned away so I couldn’t see the embarrassed look on his face. He was so short bus he probably thought it was true, that I really was banging his mom. God, what a moron. It’s hard to believe anyone could really be so oblivious.

We didn’t talk for a while after that.

After riding roller coasters for almost four hours straight, we finally worked our way around to the side of the park where his beloved Scrambler was. I couldn’t believe Joe hadn’t begged to come here sooner. Usually it was the first place we came, he always insisted on it. I wondered why today was different. Maybe his testicles had finally dropped.

When I say the Nard was obsessed with the Scrambler, I mean really
obsessed
. Not just liked, but Charlie Sheen levels of crazy for it.

He had been eaten up with his love for the Scrambler since the first time we rode it, when we were seven years old and our parents had brought us to King’s Gardens together for the first time, hoping it would help us get along, after I called him an
ass-booger
and everybody made fun of him.

I’m not sure what it was about the ride that made him so head over heels for it, exactly; it was a lame ride, probably the lamest ride in the whole park except for the merry-go-round. All you did was sit in a long seat while the whole thing went around in circles, and each of the four arms of the ride held for seats that also went around and around, faster and faster until the person stupid enough to have sat on the outside seat got squished so bad by everybody else that they couldn’t breathe.

I guess it was
okay
when we were little, but there was something about that ride that Joe was fixated on in his own
ass-booger
kind of way. He would watch it for hours if I let him, and he always jabbered on like Rain Man while he watched - about velocity and orbit and trajectories, inconstant variables and long-range, pin-point precision target odds ratios – total
ass-booger
shit.

And it wasn’t just the ride that had Joe fixated; it was the outside seat in chair number twelve that was the precise focus of his obsession. That exact seat was the one we always had to sit in when we rode it, even if that meant we had to wait for the next time loading to get it.

His fixation on the Scrambler got worse with every passing year. He started bringing equipment with him to the park – laser-pointers, wind socks, scientific calculators. He would write down ridiculous-looking formulas and equations in a little notebook, while he watched the ride go round and round.

To this day I have no idea what he was trying to accomplish. Whenever I’d ask him what he was trying to figure out, he would just mumble a bunch of garble-dee-gook. I think the Scrambler had scrambled his already fragile mind. He even kept track in his notebook of where every security camera was around the ride, and would update it meticulously if anything changed.

One time he even rode the ride while wearing a hat that had one of his gadgets hooked to the top of it. He said it was a device to measure wind speed.

Another time, he pestered me into riding it while I wore a dorky looking pair of sunglasses he had made. They were all flat and shiny and mirrored, and the left lens had a little target reticule drawn on it like a gun scope. The glasses looked so stupid I wasn’t going to do it at first, but he promised to me an elephant ear with extra cherry topping, so I rode the ride and wore his stupid sunglasses while he stood by the exit and shot a laser pointer at me, taking notes in his nardbook.

He would get back in line and ride it over and over again, and always in seat number twelve. Sometimes as he rode, he would peck away furiously at his calculator, other times he would just stare off into space, like he was in a trance.

The one thing that never changed, was that I’d eventually have to drag him away from the Scrambler. Every single year.

As we got older, the gadgets he created to do experiments on the Scrambler got fancier and fancier. Who knew what stupid shit he would do this year? I was almost excited to see, but he always made it so embarrassing. The worst year was when we were in tenth grade, the year before they sent him away to the special Monkeys-In-Training school in Massahackie.

That year he had broken down and literally cried when he found out that they had replaced the engine that turned the ride. He collapsed onto the pavement and curled up into a ball crying like a baby. He said years of his planning and research had been destroyed, that his equations would all have to be redone. He finally got to talk to the mechanic who had replaced the engine, even got him to open up the housing and show him the guts, that seemed to make him feel a little better, but the whole Rain Man episode was majorly embarrassing.

As we walked up to the Scrambler, I glanced at Joe. I was surprised to see he wasn’t shaking with his usual excitement yet, but it was obvious he was having to work hard to control himself. The look in his eye told me he was still about to lose his shit.

Next to the Scrambler was a concession stand that sold pizza, corndogs and beer. Evidently it hadn’t been a very good combination for somebody, because the air around it reeked of vomit. The day had really started to heat up, and stink fumes quivered above the asphalt walkways like stench from a dead man’s armpits.

Joe was making a bee-line for his beloved Scrambler, ass cheeks clenched tightly as he walked. Even from behind he looked like a total nard.

I couldn’t resist anymore. I
had
to fuck with him. He had been trying to play it cool all day, trying to act like he didn’t give a fuck about the Scrambler, but he wasn’t fooling me, wasn’t fooling anybody but himself.

I grabbed his shoulder just as he was about to get in line.

“Hey Joe, I’m hungry. Let’s get a bite to eat. Those corn dogs sure do smell good!” I said and pretended to sniff the air.

Joe followed my example, as I figured he would, and took a big whiff, expecting to smell something delicious. He scrunched his face up in disgust when he got a nose full of the hot vomit smell instead.

“Mmmm, Mmmm,” I said, rubbing my stomach and laughing at him.

I could tell it was killing him to have to wait. I’m sure his pockets were full of the new dorky scientific Boy Scout badge shit he had made up, festering to do his egghead experiments on that stupid ride again.

And he expected me to believe that he worked for NASA. Yeah, right. He probably bought that Maserati with a disability check for being a retard, the fucker.

But he played it cool, I’ll give him that.

“Fine, Stephen,” he said. “I think I’m going to have a corn dog. Fudge it all – let’s celebrate! I’m going to have a corn dog
and
a beer. What do you want?”

I pulled out my wallet. It was empty except for some papers with cheat codes for Donkey Kong Country 3 on them. Mom didn’t even remember to give me lunch money, goddamn it! That whore knows I got shit-canned in an illegal bullshit sting operation. Does she want me to starve to death?

Joe pulled out his wallet to pay for his food. It was stuffed with green bills, and one of them was a hundred.

“Hey Joe,” I said, holding my wallet open so he could see it was empty. “You mind picking up my lunch? I appear to be having a cash flow crisis at the moment.”

“No problem Stephen, what do you want? Anything for you, buddy,” he said.

Damn. That was easy. I should have had this fool buying my food sooner. I’m sure all that money in his wallet came from my hard earned taxes from when I was working, anyway. Fucking welfare leech was probably pulling in a mint with his disability.

“Yeah, Nard, thanks,” I told him. “Gimme two corn dogs, and a beer. No, make that two beers. I’ll get you back for it later.”

Like fuck I would.

When he pulled some cash out of his wallet to pay for the food and drinks a little card fell out, but he didn’t notice. He started fumbling with a packet of sugar or sweetener or something, and stirred it into his beer.
Ass-booger brew,
I thought.

I grabbed the card that had fallen out of his wallet off the ground real quick while he wasn’t paying attention. I was hoping it was a credit card. There was some stuff I needed on eBay for my game collection.

It wasn’t a credit card, though; it was the picture mom took from last year when we went to King’s Gardens, only I wasn’t in it. It was just a picture of the Nard all snuggled up with my mom, a big shit-eating grin on his face like they were a couple or something. He had cut me clean out. I could only see part of my shoulder in the picture in front of mom.

“What the fuck is this shit?” I asked and shoved the picture in his face when he turned around. He almost dropped the three beers he was trying hard to balance.

“You got the hots for my mom and her saggy ass titties or something?” I demanded to know.

Joe took the picture from me, his face turning red. He slipped it quickly back into his wallet like it was a winning lottery ticket or something. I was feeling angry, but first I grabbed my corn dogs and beers away from him, and chugged one down.

“You better take it slow on the beer, Stephen,” he said, trying to speak in what I’m sure he thought was a calming manner, but it just pissed me off even more. “You don’t want to puke on the Scrambler.”

I wiped off the beer that dripped down my chin and slammed the cup down on the table.

“Fuck you, Joe. Fuck you and your stupid Scramburgler,” I told him. I wanted to punch the stupid fuck right in his stupid fuck face.

“Come on, Stephen,” he said, “don’t get mad at me. We’ve been having a good day together. Let’s not ruin it now.”

“I didn’t ruin shit, Nard – you did,” I told him, and I meant it. I can only put up with his donkey-ass dumb shit so far, and this crossed the line.

“How can I hang out with you, knowing you’re running around with a picture of my mom in your pocket?” I asked. “You beat off to that picture, Joe-peeing? You think about my ugly-ass mom while you play with your wee-wee?”

“You should show some respect to your mother, Stephen,” the Nard said. He looked like he was starting to get his dander up. “She’s a very smart and beautiful woman and she has taken good care of you your whole life. Show her some respect.”

That was it. It was game on. I had treated the Nard with kid gloves for years, had made him my special charity case, taken him out in public for a day of fun every year, despite the hit I had to take to my reputation for being seen in public with him, and now he’s going to lecture me?

I don’t think so.

“Let’s get something straight right now, Nard,” I said and took a long pull of my second beer. “You are not my daddy. Just because you got a picture with my mom and cut me out of it does not give you the right to lecture me. Is this how you treat your only friend? Like a punk? Huh, retard? Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

Joe started to take a sip of his beer, but stopped as he thought of how to respond. For a second, he almost looked normal. I fully expected him to try and change the subject, to start spouting off Scrambler-related scientific nonsense.

Instead, he sat up straight and looked me dead in the eye.

“Stephen, there’s a few things I think we need to get straight between us,” he said calmly, wearing an expression as serious as a hot iron poker in the ass, and sat his beer back down on the table.

“Oh yeah, you can bet your dick there is,” I said trying to remain in control of the situation, but I was feeling uncomfortable. Suddenly he didn’t seem so retarded anymore. He was acting like a counselor, or a police officer, or something; like
he
had authority.