Bad Kid (14 page)

W
hy didn't Greg want to be my boyfriend?

That was all I could think about while I watched Carla writhe over Greg's crotch as the curtains behind her went up in flames. Slumped against the corner of Carla's living room, I found myself tripping much harder than I'd anticipated on a tab of acid called Blue Ice, which was tame-sounding compared to others we'd had, like Black Widow or Fire Ant. Blue Ice sounded like something soothing you'd take after injuring a tendon.

But Blue Ice was the opposite of cool. The sun-drenched curtains continued to burn behind Greg and Carla as they unbuttoned each other's jeans. Everything was on high heat. It wasn't all burning up so much as collapsing like a soufflé: the kitchen counter, the chandelier, the Kitty Kat wall clock ticking so loudly I thought it would shatter the windows. Each of these things seemed to be warping in an unfelt nuclear heat, rippling
and bleeding down the walls and cabinets. As Greg's forearm moved back and forth beneath Carla's crotch, the illuminated drapes brightened. Watching my best friend finger-bang this girl, I realized that the sun itself was going to burst through the walls. It was the end of the world.

But my Pineapple Crush tasted so good. Watching it melt in my hand, I couldn't stop thinking,
My God, this is the most delicious and refreshing beverage I've ever had
.

Carla's loud moan snapped me back into the moment. I thought about reminding them that I was there, slumped against the wall in the house of this punk girl I'd only met that day at lunch. Her house was the polar opposite of Raven's. It had a grand staircase in the foyer and a giant skylight in the vaulted living-room ceiling. I sat on the floor hugging my knees to my chin, perfectly content to watch Greg and Carla make out as the sun ate us whole. Carla threw her head back and let out a muffled groan, her shoulders shuddering. As I watched a girl orgasm in front of me for the first time, I thought,
How does Greg do that?

I tried to imagine myself, with my scrawny rib cage and big pores, letting someone straddle me as I made them come, and I couldn't. But Greg could. As the sky exploded behind him I was filled with admiration, lust, and rage. How could I feel all those things so intensely at the same time for the same person? Maybe it was the Blue Ice talking.

“What are you looking at?” asked Carla, pushing the lavender-tipped bangs on her otherwise hairless head behind her ear. As she dismounted Greg and sat beside me, her multizippered pants and dozen earrings jingled like a sack full of spare change.

“The sky's on fire, right?” I asked casually, the way someone might inquire about a bus route, as we stared out the window.

“Oh, wow,” she said as Greg sat down on my other side.

“It's beautiful!” Greg rested his head on my shoulder, his scent enveloping me. I looked down at the top of his head and could swear that strands of his hair were weaving themselves into a rug.

“Guys. What if hair enveloped the world?” I asked.

Greg let out a chortle. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Well, imagine it. What if hair never stopped growing and crept across the globe slowly and no one could stop it? Even if you cut your hair, it would just revolt by growing faster. All kinds of hair too! Straight hair, braided hair, Afros! And soon the weight of all that hair would crush people's homes and suffocate them and creep to new continents across the ocean floor! And these long clumps of hair would lash up out of the beach like . . . like . . . big hair waves!”

“Hair weaves?” asked Carla, with genuine terror in her eyes.

“No, hair
waves
, retard!” corrected Greg as they laughed.

Carla pinched my cheek. “David, you are
so
cute.”

“Guys! It could happen. I mean, the sun
is
eating us, after all!”

This just made them laugh harder. Greg leaned over me to cackle in Carla's ear, the length of his torso warm and heavy in my lap.

A month ago, the night we'd dropped acid for the first time, I'd felt like I'd built a bridge that had gotten me closer to him. We'd tripped until five in the morning every weekend since, sneaking through his bedroom window to fall asleep as the sun rose. Then, after six hours of fitful slumber, I'd wake up angry and confused as Greg talked about whatever random guy he'd
kissed at FX the night before. That was enough to bear without Greg making good on this whole “bisexual” thing, let alone right in front of me.

Carla? But not me? I couldn't wrap my head around it.

More often than not, all Greg talked about was Jake, who was suddenly with us all the time. Jake was under the tree with us for every lunch, lying in some girl's lap and complimenting her bracelets while Greg massaged his scalp. Or stretching as he stood up, and
unintentionally
showing the top of his ass crack as his jeans slipped down his hips. He was there every day, talking about some great punk show he'd snuck into or some awesome piercing he was going to get. A half dozen girls and boys would be totally enraptured, Greg at the front with stars in his eyes.

That said, I was right beside Greg, swooning as well. We gazed into Jake's ocean-blue eyes as his words became the wah-wah voice of Charlie Brown's teacher. The thick funk of pot stench from his clothes drifted over us as he dramatically recited Misfits lyrics like they were Walt Whitman poems. Greg would laugh as his arm grazed mine and I'd drift away, imagining him kissing Jake, or Raven kissing Jake, or Jake kissing Greg while undressing Carla and jerking off Hector as Raven gave a blow job to some muscular senior quarterback we all hated.

“What the fuck are y'all doing?” The three of us turned from the flaming window to see Jake hanging in the doorframe. His threadbare
Meat Is Murder
T-shirt rode up, exposing his lean, tan stomach. “Hey, let's go for a walk!”

As I started to get up to leave, Carla grabbed my arm, saying, “Hey, wait up.”

Greg bounded out of the room with Jake like a happy puppy, leaving me alone with Carla on the cold marble floor.

“I saw you watching,” she smiled at me.

“Um, uh . . . well . . .” I stuttered as the blood rushed to my face.

“Oh my God,” Carla sighed, holding my face in her hands and smiling. “You're blushing. That's so cute.” Before I could say anything, she put her lips against mine. I froze, feeling her hand creep down my chest and stomach toward my crotch.

“You're gay, right?” she asked.

“I'm bisexual,” I countered.

“Seriously?” She laughed. “You're a double-stuff virgin, aren't you?”

“Double-stuff virgin?”

“Yeah. It's when you're a virgin who's bisexual. It's so sad.”

“I'm not sad! Morrissey doesn't have sex and he's happy.”

“Yeah, but he doesn't want to have sex,” Carla reasoned. “He's asexual.”

“Look, I'm just tripping really hard and . . .”

“Here,” she interrupted before shoving my hand down her pants.

“Whoa!” I yelled, trying to pull my arm back.

“Shhh,” she whispered, her long legs wrapping around me like a spider. “I saw you watching us.” She wriggled closer as the burning sky brightened behind her. “Feel that?”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure what part of her vagina she was referring to.

“Not that,” she snickered, reaching down to adjust my fingers. “That.”

“Oh, that!” I said, resting my thumb against a fleshy nub.

“That's the part that feels really good when you touch it,” she whispered.

“Huh. It's like a little button,” I snickered, rubbing it faster.

“Oh yeah,” she moaned, bucking and panting as she laid back on the floor. I sped up and slowed down repeatedly, tittering quietly at the amazing amount of control my thumb had over Carla's movements and vocalizations. My diddling was getting a much bigger reaction than Greg's, which I was quite proud of. I wasn't repulsed at all, the way I thought I might be with a girl. But I wasn't turned on either, her body seeming less like a sexual object and more like a deceptively simple lab set.

“Come here,” she moaned, hiking up her shirt and pushing my mouth against her exposed nipple. I began to suck instinctively, thinking,
Gee whiz. I haven't done this in years
.

I continued to nurse and diddle, playing her body like an arcade game that would eventually spit out twenty more tickets if I operated the controls correctly.

“I want your—.” She stopped as her hand touched the loose fabric of my pants crotch. “Oh.”

“What?” I grinned. “Am I doing it wrong?”

Carla gently took my hand from her pants and chuckled, tousling my hair and kissing me softly on the forehead. “You're cute, Crabb.”

“Hey, are you guys—Whoa!” yelled Jake in the doorway. “Didn't know y'all were doin' the horizontal mambo in here!”

“It's fine,” said Carla, standing to adjust her pants. “We were just coming out.”

As Jake left, I stood up, feeling like I'd done something incorrectly. “Sorry if I messed up.”

“You were great,” smiled Carla as she took my hand. “But I think now I know why you were watching.”

At the end of the hall we found Hector and Raven sitting at
opposite sides of the dining-room table. Greg and Jake watched as Hector held up the flame from a blue plastic lighter.

“Shhh!” he said, although none of us had said anything. “Thirty seconds.”

Taking his thumb off the lighter, he leaned over Raven as she pulled up the crushed velvet sleeve of her shirt.

“Hurry,” she demanded, gritting her teeth as Hector plunged the hot metal top of the plastic lighter onto her forearm. “Fuck, that hurts!”

“Just a few seconds,” he said, blowing on the lighter as it sizzled against her flesh.

“Don't fucking blow on it, dickweed! It has to burn to make the mark!”

Thirty seconds later he removed the lighter and grinned down at his handiwork.

“Oh, Hector! It's beautiful!” Raven turned to us, holding her arm out so we could all see the blistering scar of a perfect happy face branded onto her skin. They hugged each other and waved us toward them. We formed a group huddle and began to sing along to our favorite song.

“Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to!”

“Ask” by The Smiths was like our theme song, full of lyrics about the dangers of introversion and shame. It's an unusually sunny song until the halfway mark, when, in typical Morrissey fashion, the listener is reminded that a bomb is more likely than love to “bring us together.”

“I want a happy face!” yelped Carla, beginning a slow procession as all of us held out our arms to Hector for branding. When it was finally my turn, Raven threw her arms around me.

“No, you can't hurt Davey.”

“I know,” chimed in Carla, “he's our cutie-pie.”

“No. I want to,” I said, sitting across from Hector and offering my forearm. I'd been the cutie-pie, the funny one, the sweet boy, my whole life. As Hector lowered the lighter onto my skin, I kept the pain at bay by thinking about who I could become and how I might change. I wanted to feel things I hadn't felt, touch things I hadn't touched. I wanted to break someone's heart and keep secrets of my own. Carla and Greg smiled at me from the couch as another cool blast of Blue Ice crept up my spine and into my cerebellum. There was so much left to hear and smell and taste, and I wanted all of it.

Thirty seconds later, it was over. I smiled down at the fresh scar on my arm smiling back at me. Through the patio door I could see the sun disappearing over a horizon line of burnt lawns and dull beige homes. It might not eat us after all.

Before you get all judgy concerning the over-the-top nature of this particular photograph, know that it was Halloween, the one night of the year when I could let my general fashion sense become a mockery of itself. I made those vinyl pants myself, which explains why the ass split on the dance floor an hour later. All things considered, it was a blessing, as my undercarriage was a moist pit of discomfort. Sylvia mocked my complaining, saying “Honey, vinyl doesn't breathe. Bitch, you got swamp-ass!” Luckily the cape covered my exposed butt the rest of the night. Also, I think we can all agree that the spookiest thing about this photo is the china hutch behind me.

A
s the credits to
Fried Green Tomatoes
rolled, Mike silently wept beside me. Over the last few months I'd discovered that my mom's boyfriend was a big softie.

“Aw, hell. My allergies are killin' me,” Mike murmured as my mom handed him a tissue from her purse. His son and daughter, Mickey and Sarah, sat beside me as their father had one of his “allergy attacks,” which commonly took place during reruns of
Little House on the Prairie
and ASPCA commercials.

“Oh honey,” my mother said, rubbing Mike's back.

“I'm fine. I'm fine. The air's just so gosh-darn dry in here.”

Sarah covered her face and giggled at her dad as her older brother shot her a look. Mickey was twelve and Sarah was nine.
As a queer, goth sixteen-year-old, I couldn't have had less interest in two preadolescents who were growing up on a farm in a town known for its giant legumes.

“Can I go now, Mom?” I asked, impatiently twirling the pentagram pendant hiding under my shirt. “Greg and I are watching a movie tonight, and he's waiting for me.”

“But I thought you were going to have dinner with us?”

“Oh, Teri. Let the boy go have fun with his friends,” Mike said, patting my leg. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “You mentioned you needed gas earlier. So take this.”

I thanked Mike and pocketed the cash as he wiped his cheeks. In truth, Greg and I wouldn't be watching a movie at all. We'd be going to FX. I was the designated driver, which meant I couldn't get too fucked up. So tonight, I was going to be the adult. Tonight, I was going to practice moderation.

A few hours later I was tripping my balls off in the FX parking lot. I had tried to be good, but the setting made it impossible. How was I supposed to be good with Jake and his flask sidling up to me on the dance floor?

“No, Jake. I don't want a drink. But . . . Okay. I'll have a sip.
One
sip.”

Later, on the patio, Raven handed me a joint as our favorite song played.

“I can't. I'm driving. Well . . . Okay, but I'm only having
one
toke.”

Around midnight Greg cornered me in the bathroom and took out a tiny hit of acid.

“Greg, I can't! I'm driving. Well, okay . . . I'll just have a corner of the tab.”

Over the course of three hours, this kind of “moderation” equaled one very fucked-up sixteen-year-old.

By midnight I was a mess. The four quarter-hits of Blue Angel acid I'd eaten had taken hold. I couldn't organize my thoughts. I was trying to get some fresh air and clear my head in the parking lot, but everything I saw warranted committed investigation. Concrete, tree bark, corrugated metal, and car windshields all demanded my deep and profound reflection. “Acid spiders” were creeping in and out of my peripheral vision, like a million little daddy longlegs crawling at the edges of my eyes. The muscles in my jaw kept involuntarily twitching, as if tiny hives of larval worms were uncoiling beneath my molars. I kept hearing a bizarre, metallic vibration coming from somewhere in the night.

Oh wait. That's my teeth
.

Over the muffled din of Nine Inch Nails I heard the sound of an approaching banshee getting closer and closer, until my ears felt like they were bleeding. Then it appeared above me in the sky: a plane coming in for a landing at the edge of the tarmac a few hundred yards away. The plane seemed so close that I tried to reach up and touch it. As it disappeared behind the club's roof I noticed the Pepper Creek Family Dental sign: a fluorescent light box depicting a glowing, smiling tooth with feet and Hamburger Helper–gloved hands. He held a big red toothbrush and offered a hearty thumbs-up, his bright-blue eyes peering into me like they'd seen things . . . awful things.

This sign sent me into an existential crisis.

Does that tooth know what it is?
I thought.
Does that tooth have teeth of its own?

I touched my jaw as it flexed and quivered behind my skin. As I stood there all alone in the parking lot, listening to the distant thump of “Down in It,” it hit me.

My teeth have teeth!!!

As the nightmare of these infinite dental Russian dolls took hold of me, the door to the club opened. Two girls in baby-doll dresses stumbled down the stairs and came to a sudden stop upon noticing me. I realized that most of my right hand was inside my mouth. I quickly removed it, nonchalantly wiping saliva on my pants.

“I'm out of cigarettes,” I blurted, thinking in some spontaneous fit of drug-addled logic that this would explain why I was devouring my hand. The girls ignored me and proceeded to make out on the hood of a VW Bug. Carefully I crept back toward the entrance of the club, strangely worried they might catch me and demand I stay.

No. You! Weirdo. Stand here and continue to fist your face as we kiss!

Back inside, the lights looked like they were melting from the ceiling in great, glowing drips. I had a bad case of the Icky Strickies: stomach cramps from the strychnine in the acid. My heart was pumping out of my chest to the beat of the kick drum. I thought to myself,
How is the DJ still playing Nine Inch Nails? Has he played even one non–Nine Inch Nails song since I've been here?
As Trent Reznor screamed, I found that I couldn't think of a single song in the world that wasn't a Nine Inch Nails song. “Down in It,” “Sin,” “Enjoy the Silence,” “Like a Prayer,” “Mr. Bojangles,” “The Greatest Love of All” . . . ALL by Nine Inch Nails!

I neared the dance floor and passed a hippie-goth chick covered in a thousand pimples and an oversize 10,000 Maniacs shirt.
She screamed in my face, revealing a horselike set of chompers covered in braces. Her teeth seemed to swell from her mouth like tiny white balloons trapped in metal cages.

“Be careful! THE SKINHEADS ARE HERE!”

A chill ran down my spine. Skinheads had invaded FX three times in the last month. They were the mortal enemies of freaks. To an extent, they were just like us. We were all stuck in Texas aspiring to be like the New York punks and angsty European bands we loved. But skinheads' idols and interests made them dangerous. Their identities were based on a sociopolitical divide that simply didn't exist in the suburbs of San Antonio in 1990. These guys weren't neo-Nazis or a burgeoning labor party in Manchester. They were just jerks who met at Dairy Queen for Butterfinger Blizzards to talk about who they'd finger-banged. They didn't spend the weekend picketing labor laws; they spent it bashing “fags.” And that was the problem. Skinheads: they ruined everyone's good time.

As my eyes refocused in the darkness, I saw six of them gathered in the middle of the dance floor. They were marching in slow motion around some poor sucker they were about to beat the hell out of. All the FX regulars were pressed against the walls, sipping their sodas and peering timidly through their teased bangs, waiting for this episode to come to an end.

And then I heard it: Greg's sharp, high-pitched yelp.

The poor sucker trapped in the center of that skinhead huddle was my best friend. I noticed Carla in the corner, covering her eyes as they began to beat him. I wanted her to look at me, as if we'd lock eyes and instantaneously conceive a plan of attack and jump in with crazy ninja skills to save Greg. I tried to picture our
small clan of pale, calligraphy-loving bisexuals fending off seven massive skinheads. It wouldn't work.

The club began to empty as the beating continued to blaring industrial music. I stood there under violet strobe lights and watched the whole thing play out like a flickering slide show, photo after photo of wet skin and bared teeth, mouths in the shape of the word
faggot
and strings of spit suspended in the air like ice sculptures. The kick drum of the music was impossibly loud, but somehow I could still hear Greg screaming. And then I noticed that the DJ had stopped spinning. There was no music. That incessant, pulverizing beat was coming from behind my sternum.

After a while I opened my eyes, not realizing they'd been closed. I'd retreated twenty feet back into the narrow hallway leading out of the club. I inhaled a waft of warm, strawberry-scented smoke from the fog machine as the skinheads approached me. Their oily, shining heads reflected the club lights above like domed mirrors. I pressed myself against the wall and watched them pass by, laughing and tossing a pair of bright-blue Doc Marten boots back and forth.

In the car, Greg was hysterical and barefoot. The passing streetlights looked like glowing streamers, and my spine was melting into the driver's seat. I tried to filter out Greg's psychotic screaming as the little white dotted lines in the road became albino gerbils and scattered all over the highway.

“David! What the fuck happened in there?”

“I'm sorry, Greg. I'm sorry . . .” I repeated, grinding my molars against one another as the streetlights ahead became an on-ramp to a spaceship.

“I was just minding my own business and they crowded around me! They took my fucking SHOES!!!”

“I know, Greg. It's really—”

“My favorite Doc Martens! They TOOK them! And my face!” Greg pulled down the visor and shrieked at his lumpy eye in the mirror. “My face is deformed forever!”

“Just calm down, all right?” I said, my trip intensifying as Greg ramped up the theatrics. “We're going to follow Carla to her friend's house and put ice on it!”

“Ice?! I have been through a
trauma
, David! I'm going to look like Sloth from
Goonies
!” Greg leaned over to show me his eye under the interior light. “Look at my eye!”

“I'm trying to drive! I can't look at your eye! I'm tripping really hard, okay?”

“Is there blood? It feels wet now. Do I have a weird blood-eye?”

Greg yelled and punched the dashboard for another ten minutes before we arrived at George's house at 3 a.m. George used to go to Gunther High School with us until he turned eighteen and inherited a bunch of money from his dead mother's life insurance. He immediately dropped out, bought four cars, and moved into his own place, which became a halfway house and party destination for all the runaways, drug dealers, and delinquents from our school.

As we walked in, two guys in Sid Vicious shirts were doing lines of blow off a glass coffee table. My eyes were tricked by the table's reflection, and for a moment I thought the table was a box with two guys inside who were popping out to kiss the pair of men sitting on the couch.

I plopped Greg down on the black leather couch and rushed into the kitchen.

“Where are you going? David! My face!”

“Move!” I screamed to a tranced-out girl who was staring at
water rushing over her hand beneath the faucet. She looked at me with large, empty eyes.

“It won't come off,” she murmured.

I gathered ice in a plastic bag and looked down at her pink, pruning hand, which was completely free of any marks.

“Here,” I said, shoving a roll of paper towels at her. “You already got it off!”

I could hear Greg wailing in the living room as I left her in the kitchen, smiling at the realization that she'd finally removed something that had never been there. I ran down the hall and tore through the bathroom cabinets, looking for a towel.

“David! My face!!!” Greg screamed hysterically as I entered the living room. I turned the corner, prepared to smack his perfect face, but I was totally unprepared for what I found. Bright-red blood projectile-squirted through Greg's fingers as he held his face. Wet crimson cascaded down his arm and neck as various inebriated weirdos gathered around.

Stone-cold sobriety took hold of my entire being. Greg wasn't overreacting. His face truly was ruined, and now my best friend would be blind. As I stepped forward to help him, a small black mass of velvet and crucifixes appeared between us. The smell of cheap perfume and Lubriderm enveloped me. A familiar girl with a nest of peach-colored hair glared at me from behind her black tarantula eyelashes and blew a huge plume of Marlboro Light smoke into my face.

“He's not bleeding, Miss Thang!” she blurted in a nasal South Texas whine. “I just put a raw steak on his nellie face to stop the swelling.” She reached up and flipped over the slab of pink beef covering Greg's eye. “Girl, you gotta keep the cool side on that shit!” she wheezed as bloody tears dripped down his cheek.

It was my unlikely angel: Sylvia.

“Am I shining? What about over here? Am I shiny in this light? What about my forehead? Is it shining? My nose? Is it shiny?”

Here is Greg beating the fuck out of his face behind a bleacher in 3rd-period gym class. Although our looks were still pretty tame during this time this was taken, we both already understood the value of having sheenless, matte faces. Greg carried this damn compact with him everywhere, eradicating any perceived shine the moment he felt the slightest humidity, which was all the time in San Antonio.