Bad Kid (25 page)

At 4 a.m. I woke up in Max's room, and he was gone. I crept to the living room and saw him sitting alone on the couch, cycling through cable channels, watching nothing on a loop and clicking the remote every fifteen seconds. I wanted to talk about what had happened, but a part of me didn't care what Max was thinking. A certain feeling I'd had for him was no longer there. Looking at the back of his stubbly head and thick neck, silhouetted by the big-screen TV, I wondered if I hadn't misinterpreted that “familiar feeling” I'd always had for Max. Perhaps I felt so close to him for all the wrong reasons. He wasn't a kindred spirit; he was a repressed memory.

The next morning I woke up under a blanket on the floor. Max was asleep in his bed. I got dressed, grabbed my bag, and quietly headed down the hall to leave.

“David?” I heard Ruth say. I turned to see her in the kitchen, making breakfast. “Where are you off to so early?”

“I have to get back home.”

“But it's Saturday morning. You boys have the whole weekend.”

“Sorry, I just need to get home.”

“Oh,” she said. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked up to me, taking my hands in hers. There was a frailty in her eyes that I'd never seen before. She had always been affectionate and sensitive, but there was something else there now—something damaged, tired, and a little bit broken.

“David, you know how much Max loves you?”

“Um,” I replied, taken aback.

“Well, I do too,” she said. “It's nice to have you around. You're a good influence.”

She looked into my eyes for a long time, like she was going to say something else. But all that came out was, “Thank you.”

On the drive home I couldn't stop thinking about what Ruth had said. How was I anyone's “good influence”? I was a queer, moody, drug-taking, school-skipping brat. I'd cost my father thousands of dollars and then broken his heart, and abandoned my mother when she needed me most. I thought about my own mom, and how Max played the same “good influence” role for her. How could two such bad kids be good for anyone, let alone each other?

In the kitchen at home, my mother was cooking herself lunch.

“Honey, you're home!” she said, surprised to see me. “Mike took the kids to see their mom today, and I wasn't expecting you.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “I was feeling sick and decided to come back.”

“Well, let me feel your forehead,” she said, bending my face down to her cheek. “Oh, you're a little warm.”

I've probably been “warm” for an entire year
, I thought.

“How about we stay in and watch a movie?” she asked, handing me a cold washcloth for my head. “Your mother hasn't watched a scary movie with you in ages.”

Ten minutes later we were curled up on the couch with bowls of soup, watching
Rosemary's Baby
. I'd taken a cold shower and put on comfortable clothes: gym shorts, ankle socks, and a huge shirt with a leprechaun on it.

“I'm sorry. But when a neighbor you barely know whose niece just committed suicide brings you a chalky mousse to eat, you do not eat it!” declared my mom. “
Especially
in New York City. This Rosemary is not the brightest star in the sky.”

An hour into the movie, I started to fall asleep. I felt my mother's lips kiss my forehead and heard the delicate tinkling of
spoons in bowls as she took our dirty dishes into the kitchen. I could feel my body sinking deeper into the couch, and I wasn't fighting it. I felt tired and toxic. And as a screaming Mia Farrow was impregnated with the spawn of the devil on a black silk bed, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I felt like I was home.

The Moby Dick of oversized sculptures of legume replicas: Seguin's giant pecan.

M
y senior year was going to be the year I became a “teenager.” I surrendered: to my family, to school, to Seguin. I no longer saw the three people who'd meant the most to me: Greg, Sylvia, and Max. I'd lost Greg somewhere in San Antonio to a new crew who wore loafers and went to Glee Club. Sylvia was probably waiting somewhere in a clown mask with a bag of PCP-laced cat turds. And Max, he just didn't call anymore. It was like we both knew something had splintered and we agreed, without words, to let it stay that way. I wanted new friends—friends who wouldn't get me beat up or trick me into smoking crack or enter my body with produce. I wanted to feel what
normal
felt like. And I assumed it was somewhere on the spectrum between being a khaki-wearing wallflower and a Freon-huffing slaughterhouse creeper.

I made a concerted effort to settle into life in Seguin. I sanded down my rough edges a bit and chopped off most of my
hair. In the country it was easier to find open spaces to feel alone in, Primitive Baptist cemeteries not included. Each day after school I'd drive down a long dirt road ten minutes from our house. I'd park my little blue car by an open field with an abandoned shed in it. I would take my shirt off and lie in the grass, reading my first-semester English assignment,
Brave New World
, over and over again. By October I had an honest-to-God tan. I had never known that my skin could gain, let alone maintain, actual pigment. A thing called
grunge
was screaming its way onto mainstream radio, which I inadvertently familiarized myself with thanks to the thin wall between my and my little brother's bedrooms. Before bed, I'd listen to a muffled Eddie Vedder screaming as I sketched, which I hadn't done since I was a little kid.

The strangest part of my life during the fall of 1992 was really just the act of going to class. The routine of it felt like such a novelty. But it really wasn't so bad once I got used to the rhythm of it. I even decided to involve myself in a thing called an “extracurricular activity,” which my guidance counselor had suggested would help me “get into college.” Somehow, I managed to hold in my guffaw at her suggestion.

Since I was drawing again and had always been interested in theater, I decided to join the set-design crew for the Seguin High School production of
Into the Woods
. The job itself was fine, but I'd overlooked one very troubling part of it: being around “theater people.” Loud, jubilant girls and flaming, overenunciating boys surrounded me every day after school. For the first few weeks I wanted to turn the nail gun on myself. Then I imagined turning it on the cast as Ministry's “Stigmata” roared over the PA.

Then I'd take a deep breath and remind myself,
David, this is part of the process. And you're on their turf, not the other way around
.

One afternoon I noticed some girls rehearsing onstage. One of them was a big, blond, cheery girl with sunlight virtually blasting out of her face. She had bright-blue eyes and massive, orblike boobs. She was playing one of Cinderella's evil stepsisters.

“I wish to go the festival. The festival? The festival!”

It should have driven me to nail-gun my ears closed. But this one girl's booming presence and incredible voice made it all okay. Every day, she cracked me up. I'd howl with laughter from the back of the auditorium while gluing sequins onto a wooden cow or spray-painting cornstalks onto a curtain. No one else seemed to pay attention to rehearsals, too involved in school gossip or Sadie Hawkins Dance planning to notice the incredible talent in acid-washed jeans singing before them.

Her name was Molly O'Brien. She noticed my laughter and eventually started playing to the back of the house, looking directly at me from the stage. I was her one-man audience—her audient, if you will. When we finally met I was nervous, like I was meeting someone I'd seen a lot on television. Ten minutes later I felt like I knew everything about her. Molly loved the beach and sweet cocktails and Janet Jackson. She sang in choir and was always busting out in huge explosions of song. She was the bizarro Sylvia. If Max was the mayor of freaks in New Braunfels, Molly was the queen of pep in Seguin.

She introduced me to her social clique, and soon my circle of friends consisted of girls in Daisy Dukes with spiral perms and boys on the basketball team who wore flannel shirts and loved Stone Temple Pilots. I felt like Jane Goodall, observing myself
in an exotic locale while thinking,
I can't let them know I'm
not
one of them
.

My being gay was a novelty for about a week. And then I was just . . . Dave.

The structure of my social life became vastly different. A year earlier, I'd been snorting poppers with Sylvia and driving downtown to watch transsexual hookers fight behind the Alamo. But now I was riding in the back of someone's mom's Geo Metro squeezed tight with six people going to football games, cheering with a bunch of bros and blondes as the Sequined Matadors burst through a giant piece of craft paper onto the field. My new friends had curfews and part-time jobs, and so did I. By Christmas I'd moved from my dishwashing job at the Holiday Inn to a retail job at Seguin's only music store, Hastings. I hated wearing the green apron and the price-gun belt, but the position made me significantly cooler to my new group of friends, whom Molly had named the Freedom Club, after George Michael's 1992 hit song.

The Freedom Club was a far cry from my former life, and I could sometimes hear Sylvia's running monologue in response to our tame escapades. When we adorned Molly's dad's old VW van with rainbow colors and painted
Freedom Van
on the side, I could imagine Sylvia turning up her nose and shrieking,
Minerva! Get me away from these Goody-fuckin'-Two-Shoes before I get a cavity!

I imagined her on our spring-break trip to the beach, when our friend Cindy told us that she'd snuck something “crazy” into her purse and wanted to “party.” I braced myself for Sylvia's brand of “crazy” and “party.” I thought,
Well, I
am
eighteen now. Maybe it's time I tried mainlining heroin through
a syringe that someone stole from their diabetic father. After all, it
is
spring break
. Then Cindy pulled a tiny bottle of grape liqueur from her Liz Claiborne purse and erupted into giggles. As I hooted and chanted “Party!” with everyone else in the van, I felt like the Johnny Depp character in
21 Jump Street
. I'd become a narc, a twenty-six-year-old undercover police officer with a very youthful complexion who was
this
close to busting a high school dope ring.

That duplicitous feeling was entirely gone by the time we graduated. It had taken a year, but I didn't feel like an impostor anymore. I'd become . . . a teenager. And just in time.

On graduation day, a hundred of us stood in the town square wearing our mustard-yellow gowns. We were arranged alphabetically before walking onstage, and I could barely see the members of the Freedom Club through the mass of seniors. After walking across the stage, I opened my rolled-up “degree” to see that it was, as we'd been told, just a blank piece of paper. I laughed to myself at how appropriate this seemed, but I wasn't sure why.

Afterward, Molly bounced toward me through the crowd and threw her arms around my neck. She took my hand in hers and with a giant, sunny smile, asked, “Are you excited?!”

Just then I noticed that ridiculous pecan on its pedestal behind her. Much of its outer layer was gone now. It looked like a giant ball of chalk that someone had clumsily poured chocolate malt over. It was defeated and broken, a piece of sculptural trash that no one wanted. I felt bad for the big pecan, the way I'd felt bad for Charlie Brown's sad Christmas tree as a kid. I wondered why saving it wasn't a priority for anyone.

“David,” Molly said, rubbing my hands in hers, “I'm so glad you came here and we got to know each other.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said as we hugged.

Over her shoulder I noticed something. There was a paper sign blowing in the breeze beneath Seguin's famous giant pecan. It had been bright yellow once, but now it was a pale tan from exposure to sunlight and moisture. I squinted to make out the bleeding text under the thin laminate cover.

Restoration Coming Summer of 1993!

A week later, a new nut was unveiled. It was a ten-foot oblong balloon painted to look like a pecan. It wasn't exactly a restoration. I had no earthly idea who'd thought this would solve the whole shooting problem, but it felt like good news. It sat in the scorching sun behind a chain-link fence in an ugly part of town.

“It's not exactly charming, is it?” said my mother, making a face at it and wiping her brow with a tissue. “Good Lord, son. Let's get your mother a cold Coke!”

When we got home from seeing the pecan, my acceptance letter to Southwest Texas State University was in the mail. It was a school about twenty minutes down the road in a big college town called San Marcos. My mother jumped around the kitchen like a maniac, calling all her friends while digging through her Tupperware crafting tub for a frame to mount the letter in. I felt strangely suspicious of it, thinking,
Their automated mailing system must be on the fritz. This must be a mistake. What is wrong with this institution that they would have me attend it?

I shared these concerns with my mom as she hung laundry outside.

“David. Don't question it! Just start class!”

“But I don't even know what I want to study.”

“Honey, just soak up the experience! You'll love college. There will be so many boys there. And a lot of them will be like you . . . homosexuals!”

“God, Mom. Please don't—”

“No, David. Look at your mother. You've got to learn to own that word! Just think,” she said, holding a wet towel over her heart as tears welled in her eyes, “you can bring home a boyfriend to meet your mother!”

“But it's not the end of the world if I don't meet anyone.”

“Hush with that! You're going to meet someone special! Maybe someone with an ‘athletic build.' You like ‘jocks,' right, honey? You call them ‘jocks'?”

“Why are we talking about this?” I said, trying to shield myself behind a hanging sheet.

“Open and honest,” she sighed, her warning cue for oversharing, “I didn't hang up the phone the other day when you were on with Molly talking about your ‘type.'”

“Mom!”

“I just want you to be happy,” she said, taking my hand. “You can bring home anyone, and if you love him, so will we. He could be black or Asian or even . . . handicapped!” she shouted with glee. “Your stepfather will build a ramp into this house if that's what it takes for you to have the love you deserve!” She dropped her laundry basket and threw her arms around my neck. “And he can be in family portraits with us! We'll have professional photos done at Montgomery Ward by
someone
in this town who isn't a bigot!” she railed. “Fight the power, honey! You're here! You're queer! I'm USED to it!”

The PFLAG brochures arrived a few days later.

My dad and I were still dancing around what he called my
issue
, but he was proud of me for getting into college. I think he was also simply happy I was alive. During a brief senior-year spell of family therapy with a woman named Barbara Battle, I had admitted almost every infraction: the lies, the sneaking around, and the drug use. Spending an hour in a small room with an older woman while his queer son explained how LSD made him feel was a lot for my dad. He'd leave the sessions pale and tired. Afterward, at dinner, he'd be listless, staring blankly at his plate of enchiladas. Three weeks into our sessions I went on a very long tangent, explaining the time I wore a corset and heels to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.

“How did that make you feel?” asked Barbara.

“Alive!” I responded. “And everyone told me I looked great!”

That was our last session. Thank God I never brought up the pickles.

At least he stopped asking me in his clinical way about being a “homosexual.” As many hurdles as we'd jumped, it was still awkward when anything remotely gay came up in his presence. When we were on our way to buy textbooks a week before my freshman year of college started, a story came on the car radio about how Greg Louganis, the famous Olympic diver, had just come out of the closet. The word
gay
kept repeating through the speakers.

“Gay—blah blah blah—homosexual tendencies—blah blah blah—queer identity—blah blah blah . . . sex with other men . . .”

It was like that horrible moment when you're watching a movie with your family and you realize too late that it's full of explicit language and graphic sex. The next thing you know,
you're in full rigor mortis beside your ninety-eight-year-old aunt Ruby, thinking,
Dear God. When will this rape scene in real time be OVER?

At the end of the segment they played a clip of Greg Louganis being interviewed about his sexuality and HIV-positive status. At first I was embarrassed for him, saying these things out loud. The feelings he was expressing belonged hidden in notebooks and behind the locked doors of therapists' offices, not on National Public Radio. Shouldn't he be ashamed? And shouldn't I be ashamed? As he spoke, his voice began to crack and wane. In the silences between his words I could hear the sound of a man trying to compose himself, trying his best to focus on the message at hand and not his feelings. As the segment came to an end, he talked about the rejection he felt from his friends and family, especially his father. His emotions overcame him, and the silence between his words was suddenly filled with quiet weeping.

“What an asshole,” I said, not meaning to express what I felt out loud, something I usually excelled at in my father's presence.