Running with Scissors (17 page)

3:00
A.M
. Can’t sleep. Am worried about this finger wave business. If I can’t get these down, there’s no way IN HELL they’re going to let me graduate. And no graduation means no certification. And no certification means NO HAIR EMPIRE FOR ME. I asked Kate and she said they have an instructor who stands over you and watches. This will make it even worse as far as I’m concerned. Because if I do somehow manage to finally do a good finger wave here on one of these Finches, the chances are just so close to nothing that I’ll be able to do it again in a testing environment with an instructor leaning over my shoulder and judging me. I hate to be judged. I hate school to begin with and tests which I cannot take, so this combination just seems like it’s completely ready to explode. Already I feel doomed. I feel like I am going to end up a busboy at the Hunan Hut in Amherst and then maybe someday graduate to dishwasher. And I don’t know how any of this has happened to me. How come I’m not getting ready for college? I’m fourteen and should be sitting at the kitchen table with my father, saying, “But Dad, Princeton has the better football team. I don’t care that Grandpa went to Harvard. Can’t I just do it my way? Like Sinatra?” Instead, I’m laying on a used twin bed with somebody else’s pee stains. I’m in my mother’s psychiatrist’s house for god sakes, eating candy canes for breakfast. Just this morning, Crazy Dr. F went into the bathroom for his daily 5
A.M
. bath. He didn’t know that Poo had put the fish he won at the mall in the tub. So when he walked into the bathroom and saw the tub filled with water, he thought Agnes had suddenly decided to be a good wife and filled the tub for him. So he climbed into the tub of FREEZING cold water filled with like twenty-five fish (which I can’t imagine how he missed) and then the entire house was filled with his HOWL. How did my life take such a dismal turn? What did I do wrong along the way? Oh God, I just heard a noise. I hope it’s not a serial killer. Ever since I saw that movie
Halloween
I am paranoid about serial killers. Any of Finch’s patients could be one. Especially that crazy woman who owns the Blue Moon Grill in Easthampton. I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she’s fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can’t be explained. She’s always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.

There was a soft knock at my door. A knock followed by the tickle of fingernails playing against the wood. It was Neil.

“Come in.”

He opened the door and stepped into my room. “Hi, Jocko,” he said, sitting on my bed, near my head.

“No, dog. You sit at the bottom near my feet or you sit on the floor,” I told him.

His shoulders slumped and his eyes softened. “Please don’t be like that to me tonight. Not tonight. I need you.”

“You do?” I said, closing my pen into my notebook and setting it beside me on the bed. “Good. Then that’s exactly what you won’t have. You deserve to need me, not to have me.” Ours had become a seesaw relationship, and right now it was all saw.

He winced, as if I’d just flicked water in his face.

Good.

“Come on, man. I just can’t stop thinking about you. You’ve got this fucking power over me. It’s like there’s nothing else in my life. Like it’s a stage, all blackened out with only one light in the center. You.”

I did like the idea that he associated me with a stage and professional lighting, but I still wanted to torture him. “Well, that’s too bad for you because I think you’re completely pathetic. You sicken me.”

I’d heard Natalie use the word
sicken
recently when describing something Agnes had done with a pound of ground hamburger. I’d made a mental note to add that word to my very sparse vocabulary. Right next to
panthenol
and
back-comb.

Neil began to cry. He hunched over and brought his hands up to his face, cupping it, as if he was drinking water from a stream.

“Good, you cry. You deserve to be miserable and suffer. You’re a pathetic failure of a man. I know that I certainly don’t love you anymore.” I hoped I sounded cold and nonchalant.

He turned to me. “Please?”

“No.”

“
Please?
” He tried to take my hand in his. It was his attempt at begging.

I knew what he was asking. I exhaled with effort. “Fine.” I said. “This one last time.”

“Can we do it up the ass?” he asked, suddenly brighter. “I won’t use spit like last time. We’ll use something. It won’t hurt.”

“Use what?” I was suspicious of him. He’d fucked me up the ass a few months ago, and it hurt like hell. I’d told him to stop but he just kept on going saying, “Don’t worry, the pain goes away, it feels good after a while.” I wasn’t about to get into that trap again.

He scanned my bookshelves and pointed. “That,” he said.

I craned my neck around to see what he had pointed to. It was the yellow tub of Queen Helen’s Cholesterol. I was very fond of this product, which was absorbed almost instantly into the hair. Unlike KMS Repair, which tended to weigh hair down, the old-fashioned Queen Helen’s Cholesterol was light and very effective. I tended to use it at night, while I slept, when a deeper level of conditioning could be achieved.

I yanked off my sweatpants and pulled my T-shirt over my head. Now, because of the hanging basket lamp over my bed, I was lit from above, the most unflattering light, like a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.

His cock was already hard and he began stroking it to make it even stiffer.

I, on the other hand, was completely turned off as I looked at my body under the glaring white light. Not only did I look skinny, but also almost hairless. It was disgusting. If by fourteen I still didn’t have any chest hair or hair on my legs, I figured I could pretty much forget about ever getting any. My brother had hair, but my father didn’t. He was smooth. I hated that you couldn’t choose which genes you got and which ones skipped you.

“Lie back and put your legs in the air,” he said.

I did like he said and he crouched down in front of me between my legs. He reached up for the tub of Queen Helen’s and carelessly tossed the lid on the floor.

“Pick that back up,” I said. I didn’t want pubic hair in it.

He leaned over and grabbed the lid. “Sorry,” he said. Then he dipped his fingers into the cream and rubbed it onto his cock. He dipped his fingers in again and this he used to moisturize my asshole.

My hands and feet immediately started to feel cold, like somebody had wrapped belts around them. Even though it was summer, even though it was so hot you couldn’t sleep unless you laid a wet towel across your chest, I was shaking like I was freezing cold.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll like this.”

He put his hands under my ass and then he plunged his cock into my asshole.

It was not fun and I didn’t like it at all. “It hurts.” This came out in almost a whimper and I felt ashamed that I sounded like that. I didn’t even know I could make that noise.

“It’s okay,” he said again. Then he started moaning and closed his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ you’re tight.”

The more he thrusted, the less I felt. It hurt less but it didn’t feel good.

“Oh, Jesus,” he cried.

“Shhhhhh,” I said. “Shut the fuck up. Do you want to wake the whole fucking house, you idiot?”

I wanted to get up and turn the radio on so that the sounds of this, his moaning and carrying on and the slurping noise that was coming from my ass would be muffled. But the radio was across the room.

So I closed my eyes and imagined getting up and going over to it. My imagination was vivid. I could completely visualize how it would feel to rise from the bed and step onto the sisal carpet I had taken from my mother. I could feel the scratchiness of it on the bottoms of my feet and I could feel the radio knob in my hand.

And then it was over. He pulled out of me and I was surprised by the sudden feeling of emptiness. This was followed by a wave of sadness. On the one hand, I had gotten used to the sensation of him up there, even if it made me feel really full and like I needed to take a big shit. But on the other hand I didn’t like doing it because I didn’t like him anymore and I didn’t like being on my back like that and it just seemed so weird.

He got up and walked over to the door, unlocking it and walking across the hall into the bathroom. He returned a moment later carrying one of Agnes’s pale yellow hand towels.

“You can’t use that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you just can’t. Use something else. Paper towels or something.” The feeling between my legs was repulsive. Just lying there I could feel the slickness and the very distinct sensation of his sperm leaking out of my asshole and onto my sheets, which needed washing really bad anyway.

He ended up cleaning his dick off and then my ass with my Wacky 102-FM T-shirt. It was red and tight and I hated it anyway so I didn’t care. Instead of washing it, I’d just throw it away. I’d tuck it deep into the bottom of the kitchen trash.

“You want me to suck you off?”

Instantly, my cock sprang to life. Neil had this way of sucking my cock that had addicted me to him. I’d watched him do it. It was like he slid it into his mouth between his gums and cheeks, which sounds like it would hurt, except he had really wide gums and very elastic cheeks so the feeling was incredible. I’d gotten to the point where I could come faster this way than by jerking off. In fact, with him around I almost never had to jerk off. “Yeah,” I said.

When my cock was in his mouth, he used a sideways motion with his head. So it didn’t go deep into his throat, but the part of it that was the most sensitive, the underside toward the top, this part got massaged really hard inside his mouth.

I exploded, coming in five deep spurts.

I wondered how far that would have shot if I’d been jerking off. Most of the time I would hit my chest. Sometimes my neck. And sometimes, if I were really horny, I’d shoot behind my head and hit the wall. I had a feeling now that this one would have hit the wall.

My entire body sank into the bed. I could understand why people said things like “He made me melt” on TV because that’s exactly how I felt; like I’d melted.

After feeling this for about thirty seconds I opened my eyes and he was still there, standing over me smiling. He licked his lips like he’d just eaten ice cream and he said, “That was delicious.”

He repulsed me and I wanted him to leave immediately. “Go away, dog,” I said.

His face fell again. His eyelids had this way of sort of sinking over his eyes exactly like a basset hound when he was hurt. It was a look I saw a lot because I felt I had mastered the art of hurting him. Next to obsessing over hairdressing school, hurting Neil Bookman was my favorite thing to do. I never asked myself why this was. I never thought that it was wrong of me. Instead I liked the sense of control. He made me feel powerful.

But sometimes he could get angry. Like now. His eyes blazed with anger. “You are a monster,” he said. “You are a fucking evil monster. You’re no innocent fourteen-year-old. You’re a fucking psychopath. The way you treat people,” he spat, “is so fucking sick I can’t even believe that you’re allowed to live.”

I smiled. “That’s good, Neil. Keep going. You poor, pathetic loser of a man. Express all that anger, you big boy. And another thing?” I narrowed my eyes, hoping that I looked menacing. “If you ever get out of line, I’ll go straight to the police and you will be arrested for statutory rape. You’ll spend the rest of your life rotting behind bars.”

I let that sink in.

“Now get the hell out of here.”

He turned. And he left.

After I listened to him walk down the hall, after I was sure he’d really left, I put my sweatpants and a fresh T-shirt on, flopped back on my bed and picked up my journal.

Bookman just left. He came down for one of his little visits and this time he fucked me. At least I didn’t have to suck on his penis. I hate the way he always forces my head down on it and no matter how much I choke or tell him not to he keeps shoving. So at least that didn’t happen. We had the Anal Sex and I didn’t like it. I don’t like Anal Sex and don’t know why people would want to have it. It’s another thing about Being Gay that I don’t like. I don’t like that I’m going to be a hair cutter and this is considered by people to be something that is a “Gay Thing.” But what people don’t understand is that I want to do it in a different way. In a bigger way. God, if I thought I’d be some nelly faggot working in a beauty salon in Springfield doing purple rinses on old ladies I’d kill myself. I would kill myself tonight this minute. And just as I write this now I feel this wall of sickness coming over me, I am feeling it RIGHT THIS MINUTE about the finger wave thing. When Shitvile was plugging me up with his fatheaded penis I was thinking about the finger waves again and I decided that maybe I should get a wig to practice on. I could use my allowance and get a cheap one. This way, I won’t have to keep bugging these Finches for their heads. What else. There was something else I was going to tell you that I was thinking. Oh yeah now I remember. At the end when Neil was leaving there was something in his eyes that scared me and I thought, he could be a serial killer even more than that Blue Moon Grill lady. He really and truly could do it. I think if he had had a butcher knife with him he could have used it to stab me. It freaked me out, seeing him like that. Sometimes I don’t know if I even know him at all. And I don’t know why I hate him so much. Probably because he is such a weak and pathetic person. But also there is something more about him that I don’t like and it’s always been there right from the beginning. I think it has to do with back when I was talking to him about being gay two summers ago and he was all nice and all, “it’s okay to be gay, I’ll be your friend,” and then he made me have that sex with him and then I fell in love with him only he turned out to not be worth loving, I think I’m angry with him about that. I wonder if I should talk to Finch about this? He’s always saying that if you don’t get your anger out it can kill you. Now I’m worried that my anger will kill me. But the thing is, I do try and get it out. I think of good mean names to call him but maybe these aren’t enough. Maybe I need to scream at him or something. Tonight I told him I’d go to the police if he didn’t act right and I think this scared him a little bit because his eyes went back to normal and he sort of folded up into himself and then he left. So that’s good. I have a new thing I can use on him. I would never do that of course, really go to the police. And if he ever reads this journal he will know I will never do it and then I won’t have that tool anymore so I better hide this one. I need to think of a new place. God, I have all these things to worry about on top of hair school. It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes. The one thing I did learn tonight though, is that Queen Helen’s Cholesterol is more than just a hair conditioner.