Girls on Fire(72)
Home sweet home: The house was the Bastard incarnated in brick and vinyl. Fake siding outside and fake wood floors inside, grimy kitchen that never got clean. Wallpaper that looked like little James had puked it up, paisley blotches of half-digested peas and corn. I hated that most of all, because I knew my mother hated it even more but was too lazy and cheap to do anything about it. That wallpaper, Dex, that’s everything my life is not going to be.
The Bastard wasn’t around as much as he used to be, but when he was home, his mood was foul enough to make up for it. While I was gone he’d apparently discovered the limits of paper pushing. It turned out getting to play Mussolini to an office of stoned telemarketers wasn’t as much fun as he’d expected, and his election campaign for an open slot on the school board had—praise be to whatever saint watches over public school education—stalled out at the signature-collection stage. Maybe even the dim bulbs of Battle Creek could sense he was a repellent toad; more likely, my reputation preceded him. Let him rant all he wanted about Satanism being a phantom of an overheated imagination, about the devil wearing subtler costumes; he wore his costume and I wore mine, and too bad for him if mine was more effective, because when he called Horizons they told him I was saved and refused to take me back.
Meanwhile, Mother of the Year had started drinking again for real. I kept her secret. I had plenty of practice picking up her slack, though this was the first time the slack was the kind that habitually shit itself. I’m not going to say we bonded, me and baby brother, but helpless things are genetically designed to be cute. Big heads, big eyes, some kind of protect me pheromone; there was even the occasional moment when I would bounce him on my shoulder and whisper in his ear and not be tempted to drown him in the tub while Mommy Dearest slept it off.
“You’d be better off,” I told him, and then, because no one was watching, kissed that soft little baby head and let him wrap his warm little baby fingers around my thumb. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”
It was James Jr. that did it, in the end. Or maybe it was just me, f*cked by habit, the lie slipping out before I had a chance to think. My mother had gotten drunk, left the baby alone, and that’s how the Bastard found him, squealing in a soggy diaper in an empty house, and “What kind of mother?” and “I should call the police” and “If you think I’m letting you anywhere near my son again” and “How many times do I need to teach you the same f*cking lesson” and the Bastard thought cursing was spitting in the face of Jesus—that’s how mad he was—what was I supposed to do but say it was my fault?
“I promised I would babysit,” I told him. “I thought I could just sneak out for a few minutes and no one would know.”
She let me lie for her, and I let his hand crack hard across my cheek, and I guess we both thought it would end there, but when it didn’t, when he made her choose, her daughter or his son, she let the lie sit, and so I did as I was told, packed up my shit and left.
“You’re an adult now,” she said. That’s all she said. “You can handle it.”
WHEN KURT’S MOTHER KICKED HIM out, he had to live under a f*cking bridge. At least I had the Buick. I could shower in the locker rooms before school or, if I felt like it, at Jesse Gorin’s house. He didn’t even make me suck him for the privilege. Once I caught him jerking off, and he liked that so much that occasionally I watched, but it was never a quid pro quo kind of thing. More of a favor, like how I kept him company while he listened to his death metal shit and pretended it didn’t make my ears bleed. Sometimes we’d drag the action figures out from the back of the closet and make He-Man blow Skeletor or G.I. Joe take it in the ass, then watch old metal videos until the sun came up.
It wasn’t the safest thing for him, for any of them, being seen with me. Considering what people thought they were. Considering what I was trying pretty f*cking hard to be. I even apologized once, if you can believe it. “Sorry,” I said—and you’ll have an even tougher time believing this, but I actually was—“if I’m bringing down extra shit on you guys.”
He shook his head. “Do what you do. They deserve it.” Then he showed me the box in the basement where he’d stowed all his old devil crap, the incense and the blades and some cheap polyester hoods, and told me to knock myself out.
Jesse got me a job at the Giant, where they didn’t give a shit about devil worship as long as I remembered to double bag. If life were a movie, I would have gotten a job at some down-and-out record store, enlightening losers who were still jonesing for New Kids on the Block and learning valuable life lessons from my grizzled yet sexy boss, who would hold out for a few months, like a gentleman, before hoisting me onto the counter and ringing me up. Instead I got Bart the produce guy, who looked a little like Paul McCartney if you squinted; Linda the meat lady, who was pretty sure she could convert me back to the Lord with a couple pot roast dinners; and Jeremy, our sleaze of a manager, who hit on every doubleX chromosome in sight except for me.
Sleep was hard; everything hurt too much. There were noises. Engines and sirens and crickets and planes, nothing to keep out the night. I waited for footsteps, a tap on the glass, a face at the window. When it happened, and sometimes it did, I could rev the engine and go.
I could have gone for good. I stayed for you. The two of us heading west, together, that was always the plan.