Reality Boy (2 page)

Dad arrives home. He’ll hear it, too, the minute he gets out of the car.

Basement sounds—especially Tasha’s whinnying—go to the garage first.

Giddyup.

I hear his dress shoes
tip-tap
on the cement floor and the door open… and he finds me standing in the dark like some freak. He gasps.

“Jesus, Ger!” he says. “Way to give your old man a stroke.”

I walk over to the living room doorway and switch on the main hall light. “Sorry. I just got in, too. Got distracted by the, uh—you know. Noise.”

He sighs.

“I wish she’d move out again,” I say.

“She doesn’t have anywhere to live.”

“So? Maybe she’ll learn how to get a job and not sponge off you guys if you kick her ass out.” I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s just raising my blood pressure. “She’s twenty-one.”

“You know how your mother is,” he says.
You know how your mother is.
This has been his party line since Lisi moved out.

We move into the living room, where it’s quieter. He mixes himself a drink and asks me if I want one. I usually say no. But tonight I say yes.

“I could use it. Busy night.”

“Hockey game?”

“Wrestling. Those people never stop eating,” I say.

“Heh,” he says.

“Is Lisi coming home for Christmas?” I ask. He shakes his head, so I add, “There’s no chance she’ll come back with Tasha in the house.”

He hands me a White Russian and flops himself on the couch. He’s still in the suit he wore to work this morning. It’s Saturday, and he worked at least twelve hours before he went out with his real estate group. He takes a sip from his drink.

“Those two never got along,” he says. Which is bullshit. Tasha never got along. With anyone. And it’s partially his fault, so he has these excuses.
You know how your mother is. Those two never got along.

“Thinking about what you want for your birthday?” he asks.

“Not really.” This isn’t a lie. I haven’t been thinking about my birthday at all, even though it’s just over two weeks from now.

“I guess you have some time,” he says.

“Yeah.”

We look at each other for a moment, and he manages a little smile. “So what are your plans after next year? You gonna leave me here like Lisi did?”

I say, “My options are limited.”

He nods.

“There’s always jail.” I let a few seconds pass before I say, “But I think Roger has reasoned all of that out of me.” Roger is my anger management coach.

At first he looks shocked, and then he laughs. “Phew. I thought you were serious there for a sec.”

“About that? Who’d want to go to jail?”

Right then, Danny the hillbilly opens the basement door and tiptoes into the dark kitchen and grabs a bag of tortilla
chips from the cupboard. He goes to the fridge and grabs the whole carton of iced tea. Dad and I notice that he is completely naked only when the light from the fridge shines on his pecker.

“Maybe next time you steal from me, you could put on some clothes, son,” Dad says.

Danny runs back down the steps like a rat.

That’s what we have. We have rats in our basement. Sponger rats who steal our food and don’t offer us shit for it.

I’m still thinking about my last rhetorical question to Dad.
Who’d want to go to jail?
I thought about going nuts once and hitting the mental institution. We have one of those here, only a few miles down the road, too. But Roger said mental institutions aren’t really the way they used to be. No more playing basketball with the Chief like in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

“So where to, then, Ger?” Dad asks, swirling his drink with his index finger.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to do anything, really. I just want a chance to start over and have a real life. One that wasn’t fucked up from the beginning and broadcast on international TV like a freak show.

YES, EPISODE ONE.
As in, they did more than one show of the Crapper. I was such a big hit with all those troubled parents around the country, so they wanted more chances to watch poor little Gerald squat and deposit turds in the most peculiar places.

I could almost hear the relieved parents of normal tantrum-throwing children saying
At least our kid doesn’t crap on the dining room table!

So true. So true.

What they didn’t know was this: I didn’t become the Crapper until those cameras were mounted on our walls. Until the strangers with the microphones did sound tests to
make sure they could pick up every little thing that was going on. Until I became entertainment. Before then, I was just a frustrated, confused kid who could get violent—mostly toward drywall… and Tasha.

If I was to give a postal abbreviation to my house while I was growing up, it would be UF. I was furious, yes. Livid. Enraged. Incensed. But only because everything was Unfair. Postal abbreviation UF. Zip code: ?????. (The zip code for UF probably changes every five seconds, so there’s no point trying to give it one.)

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to punch everything around me, out of confused, unacknowledged frustration. I never punched Lisi or my parents. But then, Lisi and my parents never begged me to punch them. Walls did. Furniture did. Doors did. Tasha did.

From the moment I saw Network Nanny, I didn’t really believe she was a nanny. She didn’t look like a nanny or act like a nanny. She had starlet hair—something you’d see at a red-carpet movie premiere. She was skinny. Bony, even. She dressed up, as if she was attending a wedding. She didn’t smile or possess any warmth. As if she was… acting.

They’d sent us a fake nanny.

I didn’t know this for sure until I was older, but it was true. Nanny was really Lainie Church, who was really Elizabeth Harriet Smallpiece from a small town in the south of England, who’d wanted to make it in Hollywood since she was five. Her first acting jobs were in commercials, and then she got a stint for a while in Iowa as one of those fake meteorologists
who don’t know anything about weather but act like they do. She had a very convincing Iowan accent, too. But Network Nanny was her breakthrough role.

Alongside our fake nanny was a less camera-ready
real
nanny. She wasn’t allowed to interact with us, but she winked at me sometimes. She told Fake Nanny what to do to play a good nanny. This arrangement made me mad. I remember sitting there watching them set up and wondering what I could do to really show the world how wrong things were in my life.

After meeting with her makeup artist for a half hour, Fake Nanny got into costume and character and came into the living room, where my family sat waiting. She clapped her hands and looked at the three kids. I was five, Lisi was seven, and Tasha was nearly eleven.

Then she looked exclusively at me while she talked. “Your parents have called me in because your family needs my help.” She stopped and checked her reflection in the TV screen. “Your mother says you fight all the time and that’s not acceptable behavior.”

To imagine Nanny properly, you have to give her an English accent. She dropped her
r
’s.
Behavior
was
behay-vyah
.

“Sounds to me like you need the three steps to success in this house. And we’ll start with some old-fashioned discipline. Gerald, do you know what that means?”

The director told me to shake my head no, so I did. I tried not to look into the cameras, which was why it took three takes to film scene one. How can a five-year-old not look into a camera that’s right in front of his face?

“It means we’re about to start a whole new life,” she said. “And this will be a whole new family, easy as one, two, three.”

Nanny only came around for a day and then she left her crew of cameras and cameramen there to film us being violent little bitches to one another. Then, two weeks later, she came back and decided, based on that footage, who was right, who was wrong, who needed
prop-ah punishment
, and who needed to learn more about
responsibility
. She taught Mom and Dad about the naughty chair and how to take away screen time. They made homemade charts with rows, columns, and stickers. (The girls got cat stickers. I got dog stickers.)

Nanny didn’t actually help make the charts, because her fingernails were too delicate and chart-making wasn’t in her contract. “Anyway, it’s not my job to parent these children,” she said to Mom and Dad. “It’s yours.”

What the cameras didn’t see was: Everything that made us violent little bitches happened behind closed doors or just under the radar of those microphones. And so Nanny (well, really, the
nannies
) only saw part of the picture. Which was usually me or Lisi running after Tasha, trying to hurt her.

Or me squatting on the kitchen table that day—the most-watched YouTube clip from our time on the show—after Nanny took my Game Boy away for throwing a tantrum. That was my first crap—first of many. After I spent the rest of the day in my room, she asked, “You know pooping anywhere but the toilet is dirty, don’t you?”

I nodded, but the word
dirty
just kept echoing in my head. It was what Mom had said to me when I accidentally pooped in the bathtub when I was three. “Why did you do this?” Mom asked. “Why would you be so dirty?” I was so little I didn’t remember much else, but I remembered that five minutes before, Tasha had told me she was going to help me wash my hair. Which is not what she did.

Nanny said, “Every time you poop and it’s not in the toilet, you clean it up yourself and then you go to your room for the whole day. Does that sound fair?”

I shrugged.

She repeated, “Does that sound fair?”

I ask you: Imagine any five-year-old who’s surrounded by cameras. Imagine he lives in the postal area UF. Consider that he has so little giveashit that he has started crapping on the kitchen table in front of video cameras. Then ask him this question. He will not know how to answer.

So I freaked out.

I screamed so long and loud, I thought my throat was bleeding when I was done. Then Nanny came over to me and sat down and ruffled my hair. It was the nanniest I’d ever seen her act in the two weeks I’d known her. She asked me why I was so upset, but she laughed when I told her.

“Your
sist-ah
isn’t trying to kill you, Gerald. Don’t exaggerate.”

ONE OF THE
first things they told me at anger management class was that I should get regular exercise. I thought about training on the equipment Dad had in the basement and then you-know-who dropped out of loser college for the first time and moved home, so we packed up the treadmill, the weight machine, and the Ping-Pong table and moved them to the corner of the garage.

When I explained that my home weight room now housed my number one trigger, my anger coach suggested that maybe I go to a real gym. At first, my parents would drop me at the gym a few times a week. But then I saw a different gym inside the real gym—a boxing gym. I decided then that I should go
there, because, you know, I liked to punch shit. When I told my coach that I’d joined a boxing gym, he sighed but eventually agreed—with one rule. No actual boxing. As in, no hitting other people. I was thirteen and a half and I’d already hit enough people, so I was fine with that.

The guys who train at the gym are nice, I guess, but there’s this one new guy. He’s got issues. Postal code FS all the way. He looks at me sometimes and smiles that provoking smile. I know what it means because I used to use it.

His name is Jacko. I have no idea what his real name is. He’s Jamaican, but not really, because his accent is fake. His parents moved to Blue Marsh when he was three and he’s a middle-class kid now—dreaming he could be as poor as his parents were so he could be as interesting as they are, telling stories about their fishing village and living in a shack with a tin roof or something. That’s why he fights, I bet. Because being middle-class is boring as hell.

Anyway, I don’t know why everyone is okay with me being in a boxing gym. The whole idea is pretty ironic. I mean, if I couldn’t kick your ass before, I sure as hell can kick your ass now. And that’s what I think about every single minute I’m in the gym. Kicking ass.

K-I-C-K-I-N-G A-S-S.

There is part of me that wants to kick that Jacko kid’s ass so bad, I wouldn’t mind going away for it. In jail I would be able to kick more ass and more ass until someone bigger than me killed me. And it’s all anyone expects of me at this point, right? Jail or death, I guess. Jail or death.

I pound the punching bag. I pound it until I can’t feel my fingers. Sometimes they swell for days. This sunny Sunday morning, they crack and pop, and I think about how badly damaged they’ll be when I’m old and how I’ll have to get cortisone shots like my great-uncle John, and I don’t care. I jump rope for about fifteen minutes and then I hit the speed bag—my favorite because it has rhythm and it puts me in some sort of trance.

I like the trance. It unwraps me. For fifteen minutes I am unbound from the layer of plastic wrap I’ve been wrapped in my whole life. I can see better, smell better, hear better. I can
feel
. Sometimes the speed bag makes me want to cry, it’s so good. I don’t cry, though. I just lose the rhythm and wrap myself up again—head to toe.