Fuckness (5 page)

“
Why don’t you shower up when you get home? You smell like death.” The class burst into laughter, peppered with random words like “molester,” “freak,” and “AIDS.”

I was sure I smelled. It was at that point that I was fairly certain I’d defecated in my pants.

I went home the same way as always, passing by the park. I didn’t have the energy to skip or whoop and I didn’t even really feel like it at the moment. The blobs had won today, I thought. The blobs kicked the hell out of me.

Drifter Ken was in the park, lying down on one of those thickly green painted wooden benches, sound asleep. He lay there on his back with his gray raincoat pulled up over his head. I was kind of glad he was asleep. I was really embarrassed about how bad the blobs had got ahold of me. I didn’t want him to see me like that. I also didn’t want to tell him about the sucker and my moment of weakness that had caused me to lose it. Drifter Ken was definitely not a blob. He was one of the only adults I had met that wasn’t. He said he’d never graduated school. I was pretty sure he didn’t even have a job. From talking to Drifter Ken, I got the impression a job turns a lot of adults into blobs just like school does a lot of kids. He said a job would take a man’s will to live more completely than anything else. I believed him. I believed just about everything Drifter Ken said, mainly because he wasn’t a blob. I had made it a point to never believe anything a blob told me. I dreamed of a place that had absolutely no blobs in it. If I could have convinced myself a place like that existed, I could have had a little happier day.

Chapter Four

Racecar and The Wig

The parents had to be a couple of the biggest blobs I’d ever known. They weren’t always that bad. I mean, I didn’t always see them that way. Maybe I’m the reason they were the way they were. Maybe they were the reason I was who I was. Who knows? Fuck it.

To start with, there was the mother. Her name was Sadie. There’s a song called “Sexy Sadie,” I think it’s by the Beatles, that couldn’t come further from describing the mother. In fact, if you were to hear that song in your head while watching the mother in action, it would seem cruelly humorous. I’m sure most sons wouldn’t consider their mother sexy even if she truly was but the mother, man. She was a stout woman—very large and broad-shouldered. Quite mannish, now that I think about it. Never leaving the house removed any impulse she may have had for ever getting out of her nightgown. She wore the same gown for days on end. It collected all kinds of stains and worked up an odor that could be called rank even by the gentlest of standards. Even though she never left the house or changed her gown she went through the trouble of putting on her wig every morning, a sloppy brown thing she never managed to put on straight.

She had a stroke a few years back. This was mostly because of me, she said. She said her stroke came the first time I failed. “It was God’s way of striking me down. Of waking me up and telling me that I had to stop sparing the rod.” I tried to tell her I had been failing since birth. This stroke that I or God or whoever gave her made her slur her words. She smoked constantly, her cigarette dangling out of her mouth. The cigarette coupled with the slur made it nearly impossible to understand a thing she said.

After my fist time failing, she also became a devoted follower of vodka and gin, which probably didn’t help the slurring either. She only drank the bottom-shelf stuff, the kind that comes in plastic bottles. Invariably, these bottles could be found below the kitchen sink and, wherever the mother was, a snifter was always at arm’s length. Her boozing usually knocked her out shortly after I got home, after her stories had gone off on the television.

She lived for those stories! Sometimes I think the people on the television had become more real to her than me and Racecar. I couldn’t really blame her, though. I was a dumb boring shit, fun to laugh
at
but never
with
. Nothing but trouble. Virtually retarded. And the father, the father was something different altogether.

He was, as I said before, an angry gimp. He’d lost both of his legs in a work-related incident of dubious cause. I never talked to him much, anyway—especially about that. He had this old motorized wheelchair he zoomed around the house in and he was always knocking things over—ashtrays and glasses off the coffee table, the
TV Guide
off the mother’s end table. All the lower cabinets in the kitchen had this horizontal strip of raw wood down close to the floor from him slamming into them with the unused metal footrests on that damn gimpy wheelchair. That’s all he did with his day, zooming around the house like he was in some fucking marathon for cripples. The carpet, which wasn’t in too good of shape anyway, was all worn bare from his continuous buzzing. He was trying to wean himself off the motor, though. He saw the motor, undoubtedly a modern convenience to most, as some sign of weakness. A classic case of overcompensation, he wanted to make his arms and torso huge to make up for not having any legs. He didn’t talk much and when he did it was with his teeth clenched around this old yellowed-plastic cigarette filter. He had stopped smoking after he lost his legs. He said if he ever had to go on some sort of lung gadget, it would make the wheelchair too heavy to whir around the house like that. When he did talk it was usually a fervidly passionate and obsessive rant about getting the basement all cleared out so he would have a decent place to ride his chair around. I wasn’t even sure the basement needed “all cleared out.” Nobody had ever gone down there. It could have been used as a body farm for all we knew.

The mother described the father as a “bundle of nerves.”

“
Why don’t you just
stop
for a minute,” she would strumble. “Stop turning this place into the goddamned Grand Prix.”

Even with the television turned to top volume, the mother still had to strain to hear her stories over the buzzing and clunking of the father. Sometimes he growled around that filter. This really drove the mother nuts. When he started with the growling she usually had to go into the bedroom and lie down. That’s something else she was doing more of lately, just going into the bedroom and falling asleep. If I was ever too sick to go to school, she usually stayed in bed all day. Like a whole day with me was just too much for her. Needless to say, she was bedridden most of the weekend. She would make me move the television stand over to her doorway so she could still watch it. She never let me push it all the way into the room. She said it cluttered up her room to push it all the way in. Since she made me her personal servant when I was there all day, bringing her this and that, I had to go through the tedious process of moving the television out of the doorway to get to her bed.

So that’s what the parents were like. That’s not really fair. That’s what the parents had
become
. I really hated them. I hadn’t always hated them but, lately, I hated them an awful lot. I didn’t really blame them for anything, like my failing and all that fuckness. Before I started failing, back when I actually tried to fit in, I blamed them for a lot because, even at an earlier age, I knew they had somehow created me. I never saw myself as something that came from God. I wasn’t familiar with the eggs and the sperm and all that fuckness but I could tell I was like two puzzles that had the pieces all mixed up, making a third puzzle that didn’t really look like anything. So when I was younger, I blamed them a lot because I didn’t have my own personality so I was just a combination of them and they sure were terrifically blobby wastes. But I grew out of that and I just started wondering why I had to be born to
them
. That’s really when I started hating them. I knew I still wouldn’t have fit in, but at least I could have maybe had new clothes and good food and all that fuckness.

I was sure there were a lot of other people out there who would have made better parents. Maybe if I’d been born to one of those other countless parents I could have had some sort of plan or goal or fuckness like that. Mostly I just sat around wondering how I could have been born to such slothful and ridiculous blobs like the parents.

When Miss Pearlbottom sent me home that day, I knew I had it coming. Miss Pearlbottom liked to call the parents from school whenever she thought she didn’t have an opportunity to punish me enough for one day. Like I could tell that some days she wanted to haul off and smack me, I could see it in her eyes. Those were the days she would call home so that the mother and father could properly lay into me. I hated them all. The mother, the father, and Pearlbottom combined formed some kind of fuckness triumvirate. A web of fuckness. Those three lead the fuck-Wallace-Black-in-the-ass parade.

That day, walking home through the rain, I hated them—especially the parents—with an even greater passion than usual. The only thing I could think about was getting the fuck out of Milltown and never looking at any of those blobby faces with their seeping rectum mouths ever again. I walked down the sidewalk and remembered that old saying, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” and I made sure to step on every fucking crack along my way. I briefly hoped the parents would be too tired to really punish me or maybe they would have a stroke of understanding or compassion but I guess, deep down, I knew that wouldn’t happen. They always had their ways.

Sometimes, when they didn’t jump my ass the second I walked through the door, they punished me in different ways. Like sometimes the mother wouldn’t make dinner because demons didn’t deserve dinner. That thing I said about wishing I hadn’t been born to them, well, I knew they had the same feelings. Like they wished that
I
had never been born to
them
. The mother really did think I was a demon. I would catch her saying pitiful little prayers over my bed when I was asleep, trying to get the demon to fly out. Sometimes she would make me say prayers, too. They were stupid things I tried to forget right after saying them. They all sounded like something you’d find on a napkin or book of matches. I bet the father prayed he would’ve had a son like Bucky Swarth. A stout little shit who was smart enough to get away with everything he did. Making me skip dinner was actually one of the better punishments they had in store for me. That is, I didn’t really mind it too much. The best punishment was when they flat out gave me a beating and sent me to my room. That was the best punishment because it was over so quickly. Any beating was better than thinking you’re not going to get punished and then getting punished when you least expected it.

One time I got in trouble for some stupid fuckness or the other and they didn’t say anything when I walked into the house. This was one of the first alternative punishments I can think of. So this one time there was no yelling or hitting and I didn’t bring up anything that happened at school and a couple hours went by with me at home and nothing happening. I stood by the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of ice water, thinking everything was just fine, like I’d got away with something, when the father barreled out of the living room on that wheelchair and rammed it straight into me. The hard steel hit me at the same level it usually did the cabinets and I thought that leg he hit, the left one, was broken. But I couldn’t say anything like, “What the fuck’re you doing?” because I knew that was part of my punishment. There was something inside of me that said I deserved the punishments. That it was just something I had to put up with. And the crazy fuck kept doing that for the rest of the night. I’d have my back turned and right when I heard that whirring and growling I’d try to move but it got me anyway. And it hurt like hell every time. You’d think I would have wised up after the second or third time, but that’s where my stupidity comes in. Was it stupidity or optimism? After every hit I told myself
that
had to be the last one. How could he think I could possibly take more than that?

There was this other time I got all the way to bed thinking I wasn’t going to get punished and woke up the next morning with an incredibly bad haircut. It was that morning more than any other that I awoke wishing I wasn’t such a sound sleeper. We lived right behind some train tracks and that loud sound kind of dulled me to noises and fuckall, I think. So, because I slept so fucking heavy, I woke up and had these wild tufts of hair sticking up all over my head. I looked like a crazed chemotherapy patient. I wasn’t attracting anyone anyway, but that fucking ridiculous haircut made it even worse. Like I could give up all hope of
ever
attracting anyone, or even going unnoticed which, at that point, was the best thing I could really do. It worked too, the punishment that is. The kids at school taunted me for the next month, making all kinds of stupid remarks and jokes and fuckness. Like, “Hey, Wally had a fight with a lawnmower and the lawnmower won.” I must have heard that a hundred times by the end of the month and I wanted to smash all those blobby people’s teeth out. If you ever see someone who’s had a really bad haircut, you should never start all that shit about the lawnmower because they’ve probably heard the same thing three times that day. Some of them just called me “Leukemia Boy,” like leukemia’s a disease you get from jerking off or something. I’d never hated those blobs at that fucking school more than that month I had the really bad haircut. Did they think I didn’t know my hair was ridiculous?