Fuckness (6 page)

I eventually found the clippers and evened it out myself. I got hit for that. The mother busted her drinking glass against my face and strumbled, “I didn’t tell you you could do that yet.” She acted like I was some kid who was put on the couch for quiet time and got up before my fifteen minutes were served. She was a really vacant mean sick piece of blobshit.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I never really knew how things were going to be when I walked in the door of my house. I braced myself that day I got thumped by Swarth. It felt like I had already been through so much. I didn’t really know how much more I’d be able to take.

I imagined that fatass Swarth going home to his family.

“
Hello, son,” his mom would say. “How was school?”

“
School was
great
, Mom!”

“
Oh yeah, what’d you guys
do
?”

“
Well, I beat the absolute
shit
out of this kid named Wally Black.”

“
Hmmm… I don’t know if that’s so… Wait… Wally Black, he’s that half-wit molester, isn’t he?”

“
Yeah, he’s a real queer, too.”

“
Well, that’s just
won
derful, Bucky. It’s nice to see you’re looking out for your fellow classmates like that. Looky what I bought you… A new pair of
pants
!”

I imagined things like that just to amuse myself. There were some days when I imagined things about everybody. It was like I lived this whole other world in my head, where the people I hated were truly despicable people. It depended on the person, I guess, and sometimes these things were quite mundane. That girl had a brother who was dying and she thought it was funny. That kid had sex with his mother. This other kid was a ravenous drug addict. This girl’s parents sold her into white slavery and on the weekends she had to have sex with people of exotic origins, slimy men with huge mustaches. That boy made love to a sheep. That kid had prosthetic legs. His dad was a Nazi. This kid’s gay. That one’s a Satanist. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise no one liked me.

I got onto our street, Walnut, and my body didn’t want to go any further. I wanted to be home as fast as possible if I had to be there at all, but my battered body forced me to walk kind of slowly. It was work just to focus on the sidewalk. I’d never felt so tired and sore in my life. I wanted to get the beating over with and go to my room. My room was the only place I felt even sort of comfortable in that house. Hell, it was the only place in the world I felt comfortable. That had to be my goal. That tiny room, as sad as it was, became my reason for going back to that house.

Our street wasn’t the absolute worst street to live on in Milltown but it was definitely a lower rung on the social ladder. There were three houses on the street that were just burnt out shells. The mother said that was from the crackheads. I believed her when she had first told me that but since I had stopped believing anything blobs ever said, I wasn’t so sure. The rest of the houses, like ours, looked like they were sinking into the ground or collapsing or some fuckness like that. Black soot had accumulated on all of the houses, quelling them into a monotonous gray color, the paint peeling away to reveal the weathered wood beneath. Some of the windows were boarded up. In other houses, odd things like shirts, quilts, and Confederate flags were used as blinds. Some people didn’t even have proper front doors. The whole road smelled like gasoline, oil, and sewage.

I reached our door and figured, what the hell, might as well get it over with. Had to get to my room, you know. And then I opened the door, hoping it wasn’t one of those nights where they decided to fuck around.

It wasn’t.

Chapter Five

The Horns

Fucking Racecar. He was waiting right there at the door for me. The combined smell of rotting wood and stale cigarette smoke greeted me as I stood there in front of the door, not having any idea of what was coming.

I opened the door, swinging it inside and to my left, thinking about how stiff I was from the Swarth beating. About the time I thought that thought, Racecar launched himself out of his wheelchair like a bizarre armed missile, barreling into me. The blow hurt like holy hell. I stayed upright, though, Racecar deflecting off me, thudding to the floor and rolling around. My first reaction was to tear his face off. I was so mad and sad anyway that it didn’t really matter. I could have done it. I could have killed Racecar right then and there. Not only could I have killed him, I wanted to. I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to snuff the life right out of the nightmare. But nothing wanted to move. I had those dreams sometimes where somebody was trying to fight me and when I went to fight back my punches were slow and leaden and if I tried to run away then it felt like I was trying to pull myself through water. This felt just like those dreams. By the time I had gained some sense of what was going on, Racecar wrapped a muscular hand around my ankle and yanked it out from under me. I went down hard.

“
Fuck it,” I said, mumbling it through swollen jaws and a whumming head. It was almost like I was proving a point, lying there and taking Racecar’s blows like that.

Even though he had no legs to speak of, his arms were like tree trunks from pulling himself around in that wheelchair so much. Why couldn’t he just use the motor?

I hated that fucking wheelchair.

I was face down on the carpet and those heavy hands kept hitting the back of my head. One of them was wrapped around one of my arms. I couldn’t tell which arm it was. I wasn’t sure which side of my body was which. I felt his huge eagle-shaped belt buckle digging into my back and I’m pretty sure he was trying to jab that plastic cigarette filter into one of my ears. Worst of all, I could picture him rubbing those hideous stumps all over me. I could
feel
them. The pain became a giant blur, like a huge red-black womb I tried to viciously tear myself out of. I could hear him grunting and growling, “You little shit. You little piece of shit. Fuckin lowlife trash. Never even
offered
to help me clean the goddamn basement.”

Once it felt like I slid out of that womb, everything was kind of dark and foggy and numb. It made me think of being wrapped in cotton. The impact of the blows resonated through my body but the sharp, stinging pain was gone. The mother’s voice came down all around me like a big brassy bullhorn, amplified strumbling, a needle through the cotton.

“
We’ve had it! We’ve
had
it! You’re gonna get it this time you little shit. You’ve ruined our lives. Do you
hear
me? Ruined them! We’re nothing because of you. You and your stupid failing and your shitty rotten brain. What
are
you?!” Seeing that I was a bit lost for words, she graciously strumbled the answer to her own question. "Demonshit! Demonshit! That’s what you are! Jesus
Christ
, we’re gonna mess you up this time. You’re getting the fucking demon horns you deserve and I hope you wear em til you die!”

Then I felt her wrestling with my head, pulling it up off the floor, sending snapping red shivers of pain shooting down my spine. I could smell that horrible smoke and liquor stink hanging around her in an acrid cloud. I found it in me to thrash.

The horns.

I’d seen the horns.

The Wig had threatened me with those horns before. Mostly she started using them as a way to keep me in my room at night. She told me that if I took a notion to wander, I’d wake up with those giant grotesque things on my head. I squirmed and bucked her off, managing to stand.

Racecar quickly yanked my legs out from under me, being expertly positioned to do so. I flew backward and bashed my head on the door, legs sprawled out in front of me. The mother knelt on my legs, facing me, smothering me with her mannish girth. With each breath I took, consciousness slowly slipped away.

That was the first time I felt the red crawlies and I thought maybe the mother was right.

I
did
have some kind of demon in me.

I could feel it come through my skin when the mother put those huge reddish-brown things on my head. It swirled around inside my skull, ricocheting back and forth before shooting down my spine, exploding through my heart, stomach, and groin.

In an instant, I was fully conscious. It was almost like some kind of hyper-consciousness. I could taste and sense everything in the small house. I could see everything not only as it was but also how it would look a hundred years from now.

The mother sensed it, this thing that had entered me, the red crawlies feverishly pushing against the underside of my skin, forcing me into action.

And I could smell her fear, thick and sweaty like an old dirty blanket.

She was immediately on me again, trying to undo the straps, sensing she had done something terribly wrong. With newfound strength I shoved her off. She went careering dramatically into the back of the TV, knocking it onto the flimsy coffee table before landing on the whole heap. She looked at me from below her lopsided wig and mumbled words I couldn’t hear. Words I didn’t want to hear. Words I only wanted to end.

I hoisted the TV up above my head, imagining how much pleasure she had derived from it. How many hours she had spent catatonically staring into it and then I brought it down on her head. There was a brittle, shattering sound followed by something meatier, pulpier. I picked up the TV again. Her head was a mess. The wig was split and tattered. The face beneath was unrecognizable. Her legs kicked out in the twitches of early death. I let the TV drop again and her movements ceased.

In the time it took me to do that, Racecar had managed to reach the end table and was trying to pull himself up on it. I didn’t imagine that would really do him a whole lot of good.

He pulled himself up on the ends of his stubs, his arms vibrating with anger. The end table rocked and threw him off, a lamp tumbling to the floor with him. The light bulb threw crazy shadows across the room.

Grabbing the cord from the television, I wrapped it around my hand and gave it a great yank. It came out with a stretching pop. I took the frayed end in my hand and walked over to Racecar. Yielding the cord like a whip, I lashed the father with the plug-in. He yelped in pain as the copper bit into his skin. I got down on top of him and wrapped the cord around his arms, cinching it up tight. Then I rolled him over onto his arms, his back, where he rocked and rolled like an overturned beetle.

I grabbed the base of the lamp and knocked the shade off. Racecar stared at me and I realized, I think for the first time, that his eyes were blue.

He shouted words but, to me, they were just the facial contortions of the mute.

I stood overtop of him, that feeling dancing around inside me, and I slowly moved the lamp toward his eye socket. I pressed the hot bulb further and further into his eye, watching his screams.

Then I did the other eye.

I got down on my knees beside Racecar and wrapped the lamp cord around his neck, squeezing it tighter and tighter until it started to bite into the flesh and Racecar stopped moving.

I stood, surveying the room and, with a silent whoosh, the red crawlies crawled out. The feeling was gone, leaving me to swoon there in the middle of the living room. Everything became black and blurry. My body felt like a piece of lead.

This isn’t what I wanted, I thought. And with that thought, I passed out.

Chapter Six

The Room of Idols

I woke up in my bed. The bed was really an old army cot with some blankets thrown over it. The cot. That was another punishment. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the punishments were just some form of vicious cycle. The parents would punish me and I would fail or, more often, get sent home from school or suspended, the small failures I imagined culminating into a life of failure. The night of the particular failure, they would punish me. I, in turn, probably wouldn’t do my homework, creating another failure. The cot was what I got for burning my bed. I can’t even remember what the punishment that brought that on was.

I waited for the day they both left the house, which was a very rare occurrence. I yanked the mattress and box spring out into the backyard, went back in for the wooden bed frame, doused them all in gasoline, choked down one of the mother’s Basic Menthol Lights and threw the butt onto the heap. The rancid fire warmed my soul. I even burned my blankets on the fire. I presently used whatever dirty clothes I could as covers. I wanted the mother to come into my room each morning and see what a pathetic heap she’d turned me into.

That happened a lot, me waking up in my bed without actually falling asleep in it. I knew the mother put me there. Either that or she lifted me up and slung me over Racecar’s wheelchair and had him roll me in there. This latter technique resulted in minimal work for the both of them so it was rapidly becoming the preferred method. I usually stayed in my room but a lot of nights, the folks would both be asleep before eight o’clock. That’s when I came out of my room to do the wandering. Racecar often exhausted himself from rolling around the house continuously. Even when he kept the motor on, it was still a lot of work to navigate that machine at the high speeds he chose to travel. The mother’s drinks made her doze. If I knew they were both asleep, it felt like I had the whole house to myself. Some nights I would stay up late watching cable television. Mostly I waited for them to show something with naked women in it. Sometimes I watched music videos. For whatever reason, I never masturbated unless there was a woman on the television in front of me. I always imagined it was me who was sticking Mr. Lawrence inside of the girl on the television even though they rarely showed the thing Mr. Lawrence was entering and they never showed the guys’ dicks. Because the women on the television were never naked for very long, I usually had to be pretty fastidious about my beating off. Many nights I stood there behind the couch, the remote control in one hand, the other hand shoved down my pants and vigorously stroking Mr. Lawrence, trying to come before the mother moved and busted up the erection or, even worse, woke up. If she happened to come out of her mini- coma, I quickly changed the channel back to whatever she had been watching and scurried back to my room, my underwear wet against Mr. Lawrence and that whole area down there. It’s a wonder no one at school ever accused me of smelling like semen.