Read 44 Chapters About 4 Men Online

Authors: BB Easton

Tags: #Memoir

44 Chapters About 4 Men (8 page)

BOOK: 44 Chapters About 4 Men
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Besides, if somebody at Ken’s office saw him sporting a sacred heart tattoo on his forearm with the word Crazy inked inside, the last thought they would have is,
Damn, that guy must really love his wife. She’s one lucky gal
. It would be more like,
Man, I knew Ken was an asshole. He’s so quiet and good-looking. He had to be either a serial killer or an asshole. Glad I was right about the asshole thing. Now, I can stop carrying that can of Mace around in my pocket. That shit makes me look like I have a perma-chub
.

1
Just for the record, sometimes when I feel bad about calling the father of my children a motherfucker, I remember that he
is
a motherfucker—as in, he is literally fucked by a mother, approximately once a week, while he lies there and fantasizes about his Google stock splitting. Then I don’t feel so bad.

2
That’s a gross exaggeration. I don’t really have OCD. People with OCD have actual reasons for the things they do, like the irrational belief that they will contract herpes of the eyeball if they don’t flip each and every light switch fourteen and a half times before they leave the house. There is nothing in the entire American Psychological Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
that describes my shit. I have three degrees in psychology, and I still don’t know what’s wrong with me, other than the fact that I’m a bad psychologist, obviously.

Lady and the Tramp
September 7

Dear Journal,

I’ve been thinking about my list of target behaviors again, and I’ve realized that my need for a nickname goes back to my parents. Doesn’t everything? Growing up, they
never
called me by any of my actual names. Instead, I was always Pumpkin or Cookie or Scooter or Doll Baby or Angel or—my mom’s personal favorite—Bee-Bee. (She meant it like
baby
, but since my initials were BB, it just stuck.)

So, by the infallible laws of classical conditioning, I grew to associate love with nicknames. Even now, decades later, throw a sweetheart or honey my way, and I’ll instantly assume,
This person must love and adore me
!

Stupid brain.

Although I’ve obviously grown attached to BB, my favorite moniker by far was the one my next serious boyfriend, Harley, gave me—Lady. I was sixteen, and it just sounded so grown-up and sexy. It wasn’t generic, like baby, nor did it sound like something my parents might coo into the phone when they picked it up after ten o’clock, knowing good and goddamn well that I was talking to a boy.

Lady
was statuesque. Strong. Feminine. Classy.

I was, in reality, none of those things.

When I met Harley, I had braces, weighed ninety-five pounds—including my steel-toed combat boots—and had a mostly shaved head. A charitable classmate introduced me to him after I’d been cheated on, humiliated, and repeatedly screamed at in front of the whole school by Knight.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.
Knight, the angry skinhead guy, turned out to be a shitty boyfriend? No way! Fuck, I did not see that coming!

Yeah, well, as it turned out, tidal waves eventually recede. And when they do, everything that was momentarily upended and twirled about is left smashed and soiled, miles from where it began.

As notorious and well known as Knight was, Harley James was a legend. He was the original Peach State High School bad boy. No one had ever actually seen him since he’d dropped out while my crew was still in middle school, but rumor had it that he’d been squatting in an abandoned house in Atlanta with a band of gutter punks or otherwise engaged in some form of romanticized vagrantism. I now know that such a lifestyle is actually referred to as homelessness or how people contract scabies and trauma histories, but at the time, Harley James was a punk-rock god and thus the
perfect
rebound.

A girl in my social studies class gave me his number after seeing how distraught I was over my very public and very scary now-everyone-thinks-I-might-wind-up-butchered-and-mounted-to-the-hood-of-Knight’s-truck-like-some-fucked-up-pirateship-figurehead breakup.

Unbeknownst to me, Knight had started taking those Mark McGwire steroids a few months earlier and had morphed into the goddamn Incredible Hulk. Only, unlike Bruce Banner, he stayed giant and irrational
all the time
. Yeah, picture an already blood-thirsty
Romper Stomper
-looking motherfucker and then add fifty pounds of muscles and rabies. He was terrifying. And after the spectacular drama that ensued at Trevor Walcott’s Halloween party, I was in need of a new boyfriend, stat.

I saw my life flash before my eyes that night. I’d developed a serious crush on Trevor, the new kid at school who’d been allowed to throw a massive Halloween party by his single mother. She was trying to make up for leaving his father and moving Trevor to a new school in the middle of the year by contributing to the delinquency of a shit-ton of teenagers. Trevor was smoldering hot in a guyliner, black hair, black fingernails, bedroom-plastered-with-
The Crow
-and-Nine Inch Nails-posters, takes-lithium-for-depression-and-cutting-behaviors, mysterious kind of way.

I had every intention of fucking the shit out of him at his party that night. The only problem was that I was still technically dating Knight and was afraid that parts of me might wind up in his basement freezer if I tried to break up with him.

In a stroke of genius, I realized that the solution to all my problems would be to drop off a break-up note with Knight’s mom on my way to the party, thus absolving me from any retribution should Knight find out that I’d banged Trevor on his bathroom floor that night. We would literally have been broken up for
hours
by the time I got around to discovering lithium’s unfortunate sexual side effects.

Looky there, Skeletor. Your mom even has it in writing.

I should have been a fucking lawyer because that shit was airtight.

Well, Knight’s mom must have delivered the message telepathically because I hadn’t been at the party long enough to finish whatever watered-down filth was in my Solo cup before I heard the unmistakable roar of Knight’s monster truck building in the distance.

Fuck me.

The phrase
fight-or-flight
should be amended to include
freeze
, because when my temporal lobes registered the low growl of that particular F-150 my ass froze like Bambi’s idiot mother…right before her head got blown off.

Ronald McKnight—the sadistic, homicidal, archfiend from hell—was coming for me, and all I could do was silently scream at myself from inside my paralyzed body.

Run! Hide! You’re gonna die, you stupid bitch! None of these anemic emo kids can save you! Abort! Abort!

But my steel-toed boots felt more like lead…and my slutty tiger costume began to feel more and more like a sick, ironic joke. Who was I kidding? I was no predator. I was a defenseless macilent, doe-eyed little fawn who was about to become roadkill.

All I could do was stand there in Trevor’s driveway, clutching my warm PBR, and wait for it. I was frozen like a deer in headlights, and the headlights weren’t even there yet.

Maybe he won’t kill me with all these witnesses. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me…

For what felt like a lifetime, I waited, trapped inside the inanimate meat prison that had become my body, peering into the darkness like a woodland creature who had just heard the snap of a twig under a hunter’s boot, as the distant rumble of Knight’s truck grew louder. Just as the sound erupted into a screaming boiling crescendo, the headlights of his monster truck rounded the corner and descended upon me like the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And in the blink of my big dumb forest-green eyes, it was over.

It happened so fast that when I replay the events in my head, it comes out looking like a series of still photos, like a cartoon playing in slow motion.

Knight’s monster truck screeched into Trevor’s teenager-filled cul-de-sac like an apocalyptic bat or demon coming to claim my soul. The passenger door swung open before the roaring monstrosity had even come to a complete stop. Angel Alvarez, the skank he’d been cheating on me with, flew out toward me, screaming my name and flailing her arms, as if she were on fire.

My heart slammed repeatedly into my rib cage as if to say,
Stay here and die if you want, but I’m getting the fuck out!

My mind oscillated between fear over my imminent death and confusion about why Angel was about to destroy
me
when she was obviously fucking
my
boyfriend. My body became rigid and tense, bracing for impact, as Angel’s red eyes and bared teeth closed in on me. And then my eyes widened with shock as she toppled over the curb and face-planted her seething contorted mug right at my feet, which were still rooted firmly to the driveway.

Before my stupid deer brain could register the fact that I was still standing and in one piece, Angel’s shrieking kicking, thrashing body rose before me and began moving backward, suspended in midair, as if someone had pressed the Rewind button on my worst nightmare.

The fuck?!

It wasn’t until my dilated pupils registered the silhouette of a formidable figure shoving her writhing body back into the truck that I realized that Knight had scooped up her crazy Daisy Dukes-clad ass off the driveway before she had a chance to lunge at me again. He was now putting those steroids to good use as he wrestled that syphilitic she-devil back into his eight-foot-high monster truck cab.

As they peeled away, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was not going to die. Trying to pretend like I hadn’t just pissed my pants, I dramatically chucked my plastic cup onto the ground—once I’d regained the use of my arms—and shouted after them, “What the fuck was that, Angel?”

I’ll tell you what that was, Journal. That was divine intervention. Angel Alvarez was a solid buck fifty of Valtrex-and-crystal-meth-fueled trailer-park scrapper. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I would have been liquefied on impact had I not been blessed with a guardian angel who wasn’t above tripping a bitch, not even a bitch named Angel.

After that little incident, I decided I needed to hook up with someone who could shoot lasers out of his fucking eyes. But as it turned out, Trevor couldn’t even shoot semen out of his penis with all the antidepressants in his system.

Anyway, this girl in my social studies class heard about the incident, sized up my shaved head, combat boots, and desperation and told me that Harley James,
the
Harley James, was staying at his mom’s place for a while.

Oh, transient! How mysterious!

And his mom’s place just happened to be in her neighborhood. She plopped his mom’s number on my desk with a sad smile. At the time, I thought the forlorn look was her way of expressing pity over my current situation. I now know it was guilt over introducing me to the complete and utter disappointment that was Harley James.

That night, I tapped each digit on my cordless phone with shaking hands. Sitting in an upright fetal position in my bed, I clutched my knees to my chest with my free arm and took deep breaths as my other hand clutched the ringing receiver, trying hard to channel someone older, someone cooler, someone who didn’t have fucking braces.

Oh my God, I’m a child calling a grown man from my bedroom in my parents’ house, hoping he’ll accept sex in exchange for protection from my steroid-secreting psychotic Cujo of an ex-boyfriend.

Right as I was about to slam the phone down and hyperventilate into an empty Camel Lights carton, I heard his voice. Despite being deep and rough like a Hell’s Angel would sound if he’d been smoking glass shards since the age of nine, Harley’s tone was disarmingly relaxed and warm.

I now know that he was probably just stoned out of his mind, but it was such a nice, unexpected contrast to Knight’s sharpness and intensity.

Harley’s slow, raspy cadence sounded like an old, familiar gravel road. I could almost hear the playful smile on his face and see the empty space on his lap where I would curl up and let him shield me from danger with his giant manly arms.

BOOK: 44 Chapters About 4 Men
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