by Rex Hurst
It was his granddaddy’s Schwinn from the 1950s. Not something he was proud of. Even with the basket ripped off, it was an embarrassment. Old and clunky. A “hand-me down” his parents had called it, but it was more of a castaway. Mostly it was their way of avoiding having to admit they couldn’t afford a new one.
“Everything alright at yer home?” the boy asked Jon.
“Why?”
“Yer daddy called up here lookin’ fer you.”
“He did?”
“Yep. Didn’t think he knew who I was.”
“Me neither.”
The boy, Louis Norton, had a muscular frame and straddled the bike like a pro. He was a transplant from North Carolina. The family had drifted northwards to take advantage of the very generous welfare system New York State had to offer. Like all who migrated to the city from the Bible Belt, Louis was mocked constantly due to his thick corn whiskey accent. Nothing would stop that. No matter how many teeth he knocked out, it never ended. The fact that he had a starting position on the school football team, something that would’ve stilled tongues in the small towns of the Carolinas, meant nothing. The collective Irish, Italian, Polish, and Black communities still ganged up to poke fun at the hick, which was why the jock preferred to hang out with the fringe elements of the school.
Not that they didn’t give him some friendly ribbing.
“There was a girl out of Carolina,
Who had an erratic vagina,
To the surprise of the fucker,
It would suddenly pucker,
And whistle a song made in China.”
“Yeah, y’all are real fucking funny.”
“Just kidding.”
“Uh huh, let’s get out of here.”
They zipped out into the night. How did Father know about Louis? He never seemed to pay attention to Jon’s coming and goings, or never commented on it, except to dole out punishment. What else did he know? Had he been reading Jon’s journal? After a moment’s thought, he rejected the idea. There was nothing in there about the guys. It was all filled with the fallout of his venting against the family. Still . . .
They came up canal-side by that great trench of Victorian-Era engineering, the Erie Canal, then followed it up near to the end where the great grain elevators, a marvel of Edwardian era engineering, punched the sky. One-hundred-and-twenty-feet tall, made from steel and cement, this once magnificent structure was designed to hold, weigh, and dispense grain being shipped all across the country.
The place had seen better days. The main building—called the head house—rose five-stories and was about as gutted a wreck as you can imagine. Next to the head house were eight storage silos with “Agway” written down the side in three-foot long letters. Various spindly support towers arched up next to the silos, none of which had any floors left in them. The entire structure half slumped over the water. An old marine leg, which used to scoop grain out of passing ships, had long rotted away, leaving only a damaged hump over the tops of the buildings.
In past days, two-thousand men would have been working this area. Pulling up, weighing, and dropping off grain sacks. Now, the only ones who used it were teenagers having illicit rendezvous. Waiting for them just outside was a portly girl in a jean jacket also slinging a backpack. She waved when they rode up.
“You guys are late,” she chided.
“But we’re here now,” Michael said flatly and walked past her.
“Hi, Jon,” she said, a touch of mousiness creeping around the edges of her voice. He smiled in reply, and she blushed.
“Hey, Kathy. Any trouble sneaking out?”
“No. The parents are at some exhibit opening at the museum.”
They pulled their bikes into the head house and hid them behind a half-collapsed wall. It was unlikely anyone would want them, but better safe than sorry. More sinister people than they lurked there sometimes. All the old machinery had long been removed, leaving giant holes descending through the floors, and the left-behind parts always felt shaky. No glass remained in the windows, and most of the staircases were missing stairs, but somehow they traversed all the obstacles until they reached a small claustrophobic room with a low ceiling on the fifth floor. They called it the midget room. It was their broken playroom.
Once in and the door safely sealed with a beam, Kathy took out a pack of red candles and laid them all about the room, while Louis lit them. Michael took several old tomes from his pack and settled in cross-legged. The others soon followed suit, each presenting their own books. Michael then opened a trapper keeper and took out several sheets of loose leaf paper tucked away in a folder. Jon took out his own paper. All looked at Michael with intense concentration.
“When last we met,” Michael began in an ominous tone, “you had recovered the Sunsword from the disused chapel and fought off some ghouls. You are currently back in the grand foyer.”
“After we just knock’d off that wax dummy that look’d like the vampire Strahd, hiding behind the mirror,” Louis added. “Which ah still call bullshit on. My guy woulda taken his head off. Bait and switch.”
“It’s in the module,” Michael yelled, holding up a thin blue book. “The guy there was a fake out. A dummy to trick you.”
“But ah rolled a natural twenty!”
“It doesn’t matter. Now, focus,” Michael commanded, producing a handful of glittering dice from his pack. “You’re being attacked by a gang of zombies. Your move, Louis.”
“I hit one, ah reckon,” Louis stared down at his own blue-colored dice, confused by their complex shapes. “Christ, which one do I roll again?”
“The twenty sided,” Kathy offered. “You just said it.”
“I can’t keep track of all these gawd-damned rules.”
As Louis fumbled with his dice, Jon consulted his character. Crixen Runeburner, elf mage, tall and proud. He was from a noble line of adventurers and princes. Magical rings glistened on his fingers. Multi-colored robes flowed about his willowy frame. They mystically staved off attacks and turned back spells. Around his feet flowed silken boots that allowed him to run with the speed of a pony. His right hand held a mighty heft of oak, an enchanted quarterstaff of kicking-your-fucking-ass.
Jon looked at this character sheet, thin in some places due to erasures, with pride. He had worked and sweated and rolled long and hard to raise this character with sub-standard statistics up into the powerhouse he was now. He had become a mighty hero who had conquered many a fearsome foe.
He had to admit, it wasn’t just him. The group had all built great characters with Michael running the game. They had campaigned against the giants, discovered the sinister secret of Saltmarsh, survived the Isle of Dread, unraveled the Assassin’s Knot, nearly died in the depths of Dungeonland, and now they were storming Castle Ravenloft to destroy an ancient evil that had been fouling the land for centuries.
The group had been meeting three times a week for over a year now and Jon wished they could play more. When the game was on and the die rolled, he could completely lose himself. He could see the mystic world where Crixen Runeburner strode, hear his character’s breath, and feel the power that crackled in his veins. Better than a book. Better than a movie. It was a tale they all told together. One where they were the heroes, great deeds were accomplished, and even death itself was negotiable. Quite frankly, it was better than life itself.
They played on into the night. Fighting, making discoveries, gathering treasure, uncovering secrets. All in all, having a blast. Each successful roll of the dice was a badge of honor. Every failure, a slap of shame. For Jon, this was all about the triumph, about his character becoming the best. When his guy was doing well, it made him feel good, as if he was doing good in life as well. Perhaps it was a poor substitute for actual achievement, but Jon didn’t care.
With the others, things were slightly different. Michael enjoyed controlling the world, being the man in charge. Louis . . . well he just liked to hit things. The idea of his over-muscled warrior decapitating some
monster thrilled him. And Kathy— he didn’t know exactly why she played, but considering how violent her character, Black Leaf, acted, she must be burning off some sort of frustration.
“Why the hell is there an Iron Golem down here?”
“Two of them,” Michael corrected.
“Two, Christ. And we got this here gas comin’ out of the treasure chest . . . ”
“Maybe we should run?” offered Kathy.
Louis lifted his character sheet and said with utter seriousness, “Big Jim Umbrage, he don’t run from nobody, no how.” He nudged Jon, “You ready to rock?”
“Fuck yeah!”
“Cast giant form on me.”
They played up in the midget room for the atmosphere mostly. The place had a sense of complete isolation, a leftover box of a dead generation. The walls and ceiling were well over a hundred years old and in that ruined building it seemed easier for them to slip into their mythological fantasy realm.
Michael had found it after the group was run out of Louis’s place by his strict and loud Anabaptist parents. They had listened to some half-baked tele-preacher rattle on about the evils of D&D and were convinced it was a tool of the devil. Of course, they also believed that about most music, TV, films, toys—He-Man in particular for some reason—and popular video games, like Pac Man and Donkey Kong. Hell, even Root Beer Tapper gave them pause.
For obvious reasons, Jon and Michael’s homes were out. Kathy gave only vague reasons, but they got the impression she was ashamed of her parents. So they used the midget room, which turned out to be an ideal place. There they didn’t need to be polite or watch their language.
“Goddamn son of a bitch, hit that fucker with a fucking lightnin’ bolt before he knocks the shit out of us.”
Or clean up after themselves. The room was littered with crushed cola cans and candy bar wrappers. Or respect the property. The building was practically a ghost in any case.
They gamed on and on, well past the witching hour, until their first yawns indicated that they might have to stop. It was easy to lose track of time while in the game.
“Alright, I guess we better pack it in,” Michael concluded. “We all got school tomorrow.”
“You mean today.”
He laughed, “Yeah.”
“And ah got practice.”
“Have fun with that.”
“Whatever. Just ‘cause you all couldn’t make the cut—”
They carefully exited the head house. Michael almost slipped on some rickety stairs, but he grabbed the holes in the wall and steadied himself. Jon felt joy slip away. Back to the grind of life. Back to the family bullshit. Every time the group started up, he wished they would keep going until they all passed out, then wake up and start over.
Once out, Kathy tugged Jon’s sleeve. “Can you ride with me home? It’s later than usual.”
“Sure.”
“Oooh-la-la,” joked Michael and rode off. Louis followed, pulling huge yawns that stretched out his face.
“Oh, whatever,” she called after Michael. “It’s not even like that.”
Of course not. Not even the rotund girls with pizza faces, like Kathy, wanted Jon. And forget about the ones he actually lusted after, the Playboy bunnies and Sears underwear models. They haunted his dreams and stoked his loins, leading to many a sticky night. Jon had spent too much time watching the idiot box and believing that the big lie would come true. That just around the corner the magical supermodel would beckon towards him, lusting for his body. All he wanted was one incredibly hot woman to have sex with all the time. Him and the rest of the male population. He despaired of ever getting sexual pleasure from anything other than his right hand.
Jon had run across some abstinence literature once that described his virginity as a “noble choice” and one of the “greatest gifts he had to give.” What a load of horseshit. It was a millstone. A giant obstacle he needed to knock over if he was really going to start living his life. At that moment, he would happily let some toothless crack-whore gum his cock into an explosion just to get it all over with. So he could finally feel like a man and stop lying about being a virgin.
They rode on through the chilly streets. An occasional neighborhood bar would flash by, the local drunks all clustered together yelling about the game or whatever, but otherwise the roads were dead. Everyone was tucked away somewhere warm, away from the night air, where Jon should have been.
It took a while to get to her house and Jon was near exhausted when they finally zipped up to a two-story townhouse done in a neo-colonial style. It was on the cusp of a much more affluent neighborhood, where the houses were wider, the bars almost nonexistent, and the corner groceries didn’t universally proclaim, “We Accept Food Stamps.” It was the sort of neighborhood Jon felt he belonged in.
“What do your parents do again?”
“My dad’s the director of the Museum of History and mom teaches archeology at Buff State.”
“Nice place.”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” she replied and walked over to him, eyes nervously looking at her fingers. “Thanks for the escort.”
“Oh, no problem.”
She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and walked away. That caught him off guard, even though it shouldn’t have. The signs had been there. He had just missed them. There was his opportunity for sexual exploration, but Jon shrugged it off. He was getting too tired to care about anything. Jon watched her walk down the path to her house and enter. Then he cycled away into the night, yawning all the while.
CHAPTER 3
What Rough Beast
Father found him on the way back from Kathy’s house.
A town car, freshly minted and fully loaded, pulled up to Jon on an empty street. It sparkled under the streetlights and the yellow eyes of its driver sparkled along with it. Jon’s father stepped out. Well-muscled and trim, he was always perfectly dressed with neat crisp lines. He never seemed to sweat or get dirty. He always knew what to say and how to act, to get what he wanted. Perfection clung naturally to him. From that perfection came a confidence Jon could never hope for.
Punishment was looming. Mother found the problems. Father corrected them. He towered over Jon like a giant. The teen shrank under his shadow. The elder fixed him with his eyes, seeming to drink in Jon’s every weakness before saying, “So you didn’t do as you were ordered.”
He let that dangle like a viper between them.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
Jon’s head hung down, his ball cap shading all but the lower jut of his chin. He felt anger at having to be in this spot. What the hell does it matter if I went off with some friends? Then shame at having failed in other’s eyes. It was my job. I was told to do it. Then acceptance that he needed to be punished. Better take it then. Sooner it begins, sooner it’s over.
“I’m sorry,” he said in his patented whipped dog tone.
Father stared for a moment. His implacable gaze burned into Jon’s body. Once again, the boy was a failure. Once again, he needed to be punished. Father sighed.
“You’re sorry. Here’s what sorry gets you.”
He pulled a large monkey wrench from the trunk and walked over to the bicycle. He paused, waiting for an objection from Jon, then shoved his son aside and began pounding away. He smashed through the handlebars, bent the axle, broke the tire rims, ripped out the spokes, and snapped the chain.
Father backed away still perfectly dressed, not a hair out of place. “Bring this junk heap back home,” he ordered and drove off in his car, leaving Jon to eat his dust.
Jon hefted the bike and stumbled over the uneven cement blocks of the sidewalk. It was a long, savage haul at that time of night, with the temperature rapidly falling. The cold numbed his legs, while the weight of the bike bit into his hand and strained his muscles to their limit. Little weeds and sticky plants grew up between them. Jon cursed each one, then cursed his family, their house, and kept cursing until he had reached back to his great-great-grandf
ather. With every curse, he forgot some of his burden. Each spark of hate warmed him a little.
By the time he made it back home, the birds were chirping. He dumped the bike at the end of the driveway, right behind Father’s car. Hopefully the old man wouldn’t notice, would back over it and ruin some of that car’s perfection. Probably not, though. Father just didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. The best revenge Jon could hope for was to make the old man move the wreckage himself. He’d take whatever he could get. He went inside.
The jokes he and Michael had made earlier about the whorishness of the average Black Rock teenage girl had a germ of truth embedded at its heart. The most average example of that type lay sprawled before him on the living room divan. His older sister, Michelle, snored away. Blobs of puke were smeared down her pinhole-burn-ridden shirt and collected into a grimy pool on the antique oriental carpet. A half-empty Beefeaters bottle lay curled under her arm like an adored child.
She was the greatest whore Jon had ever heard of, except she never got paid. She sucked a new cock every other day. Alcohol was her mother’s milk. There wasn’t a drug that she hadn’t smoked or snorted. Track marks ran up and down her arms. Every one of her teeth had rotted out of her head and had been replaced with dentures.
All this decadence was abetted by their parents. They had let Michelle effectively drop out of school at twelve. Technically, she was enrolled under the Home-School Act in New York State, but no actual educating, except how to apply makeup, went on. All assignments and tests that the state required be submitted had been forged. Jon knew this because he had been forced to write a few papers for her. On her sixteenth birthday, they officially let her withdraw from her education requirements. Father had a party to celebrate the event where Michelle was presented with her first bong, a blue glass affair with her name emblazoned along the stem in rhinestones.
She was rail thin from the substance abuse and her parents had invested in a portable IV rack, so they could inject her with nutrients whenever she passed out. At nineteen, she still looked good. The amount of slavering hormonal boys tramping through the house was testament enough to this, but that would soon pass. No one could abuse their body so much without it eventually collapsing into a wreck, or at least Jon hoped that was the case.
