by Chris Stuck
* * *
The first time I went to his house, he stopped me at the driveway and said, “Wait.”
We were both straddling our bikes. I asked what was wrong.
“Nothing.” He kicked a rock and looked off. “It’s just that you’re rich.”
I looked up his long, dusty driveway and smirked. “Believe me, we aren’t.” I started telling him that we used to be rich. I almost mentioned New York, but I thought of Dwayne. I just said my family had fallen on hard times, which after seeing his house made me feel like a fraud.
“No, you’re still rich,” he said. “Your house is nice. It looks like all the other houses on your street.”
I said, “That means it isn’t nice and that we aren’t rich.”
Sterling looked up at his house and said, “Forget it.”
The Desert Sands was more of a clump of homes than an actual development. They were dirty and haphazardly terraced on one of the North Hills, all of them surrounded by scrub brush and tumbleweeds, the odd prairie dog poking up out of the dust. When we came up to his house’s carport, some guy was inside painting a dented muscle car with a pneumatic spray gun. He was bald on top with shaggy hair around the sides, shirtless, his brawny arms stamped with tattoos. From the looks of it, he seemed to be painting the car the exact same green that it already was. Sterling mumbled, “Rick. My stepdad.”
I went to raise my hand to wave, but he stopped me. I looked down at his hand on my wrist. There was an old scar on his thumb. His fingernails were deeply bitten. He let go.
It was then that Rick finally noticed us. He immediately started grumbling as he wielded his paint gun and a lit cigarette in one hand. He called us “little faggots.” He told us not to kick up any rocks or dust or else we’d screw up his paint job. We mumbled okay and carefully laid down our bikes and went inside. I looked back at him and thought I heard him call us little faggots again. Then I just heard the hiss of the spray gun.
For dinner, his mother said all they had was cereal. There were no introductions. She just sat on the couch, smoking cigarettes in a wifebeater and pair of bikini bottoms. The room had an odd herbal aroma. A stick of incense smoldered in the ashtray as well as a ceramic pipe shaped like a penis. I looked at it for a second as Sterling made up the bowls of cereal. Then his mother said, “Oh, but fuck a duck. We’re out of regular milk. How about chocolate?”
“With Raisin Bran?” Sterling said. “That won’t be any fucking good.”
I looked at his mother, expecting her to smack him. I’d never heard any of my friends curse in front of their parents, but she didn’t seem fazed at all.
“Sure it the fuck will,” she said. “It’ll be fucking great.” As if she thought she’d made our day, she got the gallon jug out of the fridge. She came up behind me, her cigarette dangling out of the side of her mouth. “It’s brown like you. You’ll like that, won’t ya? All you people do.” Her gums were severely receded, her teeth the color of butter. She slapped me on the shoulder, let out a phlegmy laugh, and went back to the couch.
I dug in, because I felt I should. I said, “Actually, this is kind of tasty. Sort of.”
“No, it isn’t. You’re just being nice.” Sterling got up and poured his bowl into the kitchen sink. He went to his room, and I followed. I looked back at his mother, and she smiled crookedly. “Don’t you two be playing any grab-ass in there, you hear?”
I must’ve furrowed my brow because she laughed so long that I went and caught up with Sterling. Me just turning my back made her laugh even more.
* * *
When people sense you’re smarter than them, they tend to not like you. Either you ruin the bell curve or you unwittingly make their lives difficult. This is especially true if they’re an adult and you’re a kid, which was the case with Dwayne. It was unfortunate. A part of me almost wanted to be like him. My life would’ve been a lot easier. He was white, of average intelligence, broad shouldered and muscular, with a square, symmetrical face. He was married with some children somewhere, I was pretty sure. A gold wedding band usually glinted on his ring finger. Even his cleft chin was somehow appealing, perfectly centered on the tip of his mandible, the mouth of a blossom.
Still, I was sure he despised me. Twice a month, he paid me and my family a visit, showing up in his silver Chrysler K car, sweating in a blue sports coat. He’d check in with my parents, who smiled in his presence but called him a dolt in his absence. He’d go and sit in Trudy’s room and talk to her, where I was sure she flirted with him. Then he’d come out, point my way, and say, “You’re with me.” We’d get in his K car and go somewhere.
He’d ask about school. He’d ask about my family. Then he’d ask if I was maintaining “our cover.” I’d give short affirmative answers, and then we’d go to Baskin-Robbins or Farrell’s and I’d watch him eat ice cream. This time, though, he turned to me and just said he had me figured out.
“Really?” I said. “And without me even asking. Thanks.” The floorboards were littered with copies of Inside Kung-Fu with Chuck Norris on the cover.
“You,” Dwayne said, “are prone to infatuation. That’s what always gets you in trouble.” I must’ve sighed, because he looked at me and asked what was wrong.
I told him I felt bad. I didn’t bring any grossly overstated opinions about him.
“Huh?” he said.
“You’re psychoanalyzing me.”
“Okay.”
“In case you didn’t know, people don’t like that. It makes them feel weird, and it makes you seem condescending.”
“That so,” he said. “You know what some other people like me don’t like? Having some corny-ass kid blow his family’s cover every six months, necessitating a new identity and a new home.”
I noticed he didn’t have his wedding band on anymore. There was just a tan line where the ring used to be. I looked out the window. “Let me guess. You just went back to school. MS in psychology.”
My hunch must’ve been correct, because he told me to zip it. He hated when my comebacks were better than his. I told him I was just processing things. I didn’t know if I was still me or if I was slowly becoming someone else.
“See, that’s your first mistake. Thinking about it.” Dwayne threw on his mirrored aviators. “My dad beat the hell out of me when I was a kid. If I stopped and thought about it, I’d probably kill him and me both.” He started to say, “Hell, if my wife knew how to goddamn be one,” but then he stopped.
“I guess I should just suppress my feelings and compartmentalize, then.”
“Exactamundo.”
I looked out the window as we passed Metso’s Cocktail Lounge and then the Paris Adult Theater. Dirty, intoxicated people were swaying out front. “From what I’ve heard, that leads to more problems.”
“Fine.” Dwayne destroyed a Chiclet with his incisors. “I can get another psychologist for you to talk to. That sounds like super-duper fun, doesn’t it?”
I glanced away and then back at him.
“That’s what I thought.” We stopped at a red light, and he turned to me intensely, as he sometimes did. As he gathered his thoughts, his face quivering in front of me, I could see my reflection in his sunglasses, two of me staring back. They didn’t even look like me.
“Listen, I’m not trying to be a hard-ass. But if we have any more problems, you and your family are on your own. And that ain’t no joke.”
“Right,” I said. “Some mobsters will come and kill us because my father laundered some money.”
Dwayne ran his hand over his prickly buzz cut and glanced at me a few times. “That’s not what your father did, but hey, things happen. You think they won’t, but then they do. That’s how life works.” He rubbed his ringless ring finger with his thumb and then picked up his hand exerciser and started squeezing it. “I don’t think you know how lucky you are. Some of my other cases aren’t too pretty. Your family at least had money and education.”
“None of which we got to bring with us.”<
br />
It was a point of contention between him and my parents. All our assets had been liquidated to pay for our relocations. Our pasts were erased. It was something I heard my parents argue about late at night. We didn’t exist. We had Social Security numbers but no birth certificates. During some of my mother’s drunken fits, she often yelled that she graduated magna cum laude from Yale, with top honors from Harvard. Now, as Delores Norris, she was supposedly only a high school graduate. It had gotten to the point that once we even got in our Spectrum, ready to leave for good. My father backed out of the driveway and wound around the neighborhood for a few minutes. It seemed like all this would be behind us. But he eventually just turned around and we pulled back into our driveway and all went inside like it never happened.
“Sorry,” Dwayne said. “But that was the deal. They agreed to it.” He looked my way and seemed to soften. Having children probably made him empathize with me. He looked at me over his aviators and shook out a Chiclet, which I took.
We pulled into the Paradise Valley Mall, and he asked if I wanted to see a movie. “Chuck Norris, the greatest action star of all time, has a new film out. Wanna know what it’s called?” He gave me a long look. “Code of Silence.”
For a moment, I thought he was giving me some sort of subliminal message. It was like him to do that. But then he started telling me that he’d seen the movie six times already, that it was a fine film.
Though I was now named Chuck Norris, I said I didn’t know his oeuvre that well.
“Oeuvre?” Dwayne said. “All I know is he kicks mucho ass in it. Good enough?”
I nodded. “Bellíssimo.”
* * *
Since it was the eighties, Sterling and I were completely unsupervised. We set things on fire on purpose. We set things on fire on accident. We found out that if you put a lit lighter to the nozzle of a can of air freshener and pressed the spray button you’d effectively made a low-powered blowtorch. We singed our eyebrows. When it was really hot outside, we tried to fry eggs on the sidewalk. It never worked.
We listened to Dr. Demento on KZZP. We bought candy at the Pic ’n Save, which we called the Pick Your Nose. When it rained, we swam in the flooded streets and parking lots. We rode our bikes around half-finished developments that’d been left abandoned. Occasionally, we entered the houses through unlocked sliding glass doors and windows and would fling throwing stars at the new drywall.
We were boys. We called each other fags, fruits, fudgepackers. We watched movies endlessly. At his house, when his mother and Rick were gone, we’d even sneak into their messy bedroom and watch the scrambled Playboy channel on Dimension Cable. A line of static cut the screen in half, naked white bodies wriggling on either side, Sterling and I both getting boners. He’d say, “You’re not looking at the guy, right?” And I’d say, “Of course not.” Then he’d laugh for a really long time and slap me on the back.
The eighties seemed so bright and neon, so full of commercials, that you could almost forget the feeling of danger that was everywhere. Nukes. Drugs. Stranger danger. Stepdads. The more I got to know Sterling, the more I heard about Rick and his mother. I sensed Sterling didn’t like being at home very much. He said sometimes they hit him. When I asked if he wanted me to tell someone, a logical option to me, he said, “No way. Are you crazy? They’ll just hit me some more.” It was a mode of thinking I slowly came to understand.
A few times, when Rick thought I wasn’t at their house, I’d heard him ask Sterling’s mother why that “little Black fucker” was always around. He was usually lifting weights in the corner of their living room or punching a speed bag. Sometimes, he stood over a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums in the back of their carport, stirring something that smelled horrible but that he called “primo shit.” The first time he called me a name, I looked at Sterling to see if he heard, but he seemed to be in a trance as he played Asteroids on his Atari. I sat down next to him, and he did put his arm over my shoulder. But I couldn’t tell if it was to comfort me. He pulled his arm back. Our legs were right next to each other. I thought I should move away.
* * *
To his credit, Dwayne wasn’t completely off with my “infatuations.” In Seattle, something had happened. In Denver and Boring, too. There was the word “close.” Bernie and Steve are getting too close. Marvin (me) and Peter are too close. Bobby (also me) and Ricky are too close. Their father or uncle or mother would start to think something about me and my family. Some of them were God-fearers. Maybe I was too nice. Maybe I was too different. Wherever we went, we were the only Black family anyway. Maybe that had something to do with it.
With Sterling, I wasn’t sure what I felt, but there was a pull. I liked doing boy things, it turned out. Sterling taught me not only how to use nunchucks but how to use them without hitting myself in the balls. He taught me how to open and close his butterfly knife, which he called a balisong, I think to impress me. He said his real father, a former marine, taught him. Sterling’s big, blistered hands manipulated my small, soft ones. Hold the safe handle, fling the knife open with a flick of the wrist, let the handle rotate in your grip. The knife was open. Do it in reverse and the knife was closed. There was the vertical open, the horizontal open, the double rollout. The metallic chatter of the knife opening and closing was soothing to both of us. Flick. Click. Flick. Open. Flick. Click. Flick. Closed. I became infatuated with the knife. When shut, you would never think there was a blade inside.
I asked where his father was, and he said California and then he scratched his head, as though he wasn’t quite sure. “But he’s coming for me.” He smiled as he flicked the knife. “Real soon.” It sounded like an unrealized dream, one that he’d probably been holding on to for some time. I thought it best not to ruin it for him. He said his father moved a lot, was what his mother and Rick called a “dirty hippie.” Neither of us really knew what that meant, since his mother and Rick were pretty dirty themselves. The vulgarity of life, as my grandfather used to say. We were in the middle of it. It sent us farther into the world to figure things out for ourselves.
* * *
By the middle of the first semester, we’d gone from innocence to destruction to the taboo, which just meant that we’d sneaked into a few R-rated movies. But we stepped up our game. We cursed around grown-ups. Fuck. Bitch. Dickhead. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, Sterling had developed the unique ability to show up with things he said he’d “found.” His butterfly knife. That big-ass magnifying glass. More throwing stars. The latest issue of a porno magazine called Black Tail. We kept a lot of these treasures stashed in Paradise Valley Park, in a huge bush that was hollow in the center. It was so big we could crawl inside and hang out under the canopy, sitting cross-legged as we looked at these illicit things. My heart beat quickly as we played with the butterfly knife, as we flipped the pages of the magazine, me trying to look just at the women. Sterling openly rubbed his crotch, always saying the same thing, “Look at that ass. Look at those tits. Look at that puss.” I sort of twisted the waist of my pants to make them tight against my own dick. We got to the back of the magazine and laughed at all the ads for VHS tapes for sale. Sex Wars. Indiana Bones and the Temple of Womb. Frisky Business. When it got dark, we put everything but the butterfly knife in a little ammo box we’d buried there inside the bush. We jumped back on our bikes, and Sterling said, “Man, I’ve really gotta get my hands on one of those tapes, right?”
My privates were still a bit warm. I was almost afraid where this would go. I wondered if we were heading too far into the taboo. I wanted to tell him that he should probably stop “finding” things. We could think of other things to do. But when I looked at him, I thought of his home life and the fact that now he was happy. I said, “Sure. That would be cool. Why not?”
* * *
I didn’t see Sterling for a few days after that. I knocked on his door, but there was no answer. I thought maybe he’d gotten in trouble for stealing, that he was locked up somewhere in a juvenile facility
, but on the fourth day, his mother slowly answered the door. She was in her usual tank top, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She could barely keep her eyes open. “Oh,” she said. “Sterling’s gone. He’s gonna live with his father for a while. He didn’t tell you?”
I said no, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. She said she wanted her kid to live different places. “Not just this hellhole.” She said, “You know what I mean?” as though I weren’t just a kid. Something in the distance caught her attention, and she watched it for a moment. Then she laughed. I sensed this story was her version of the events. Inside the house, I heard Rick grumble, “Good riddance. I was tired of that little shit anyway.” I asked her how long Sterling would be gone, and she seemed to lose her train of thought. Her tired, bloodshot eyes curled up briefly under their lids. I reached out and touched her arm, and she woke up. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’ll be back.” She turned and wandered away from the open door and into the back bedrooms. I saw Sterling’s butterfly knife sitting on a table in the foyer. I walked far enough inside to reach in and grab it.
* * *
A week went by and then two. I wrote Sterling a letter and left it at his mother’s, hoping she’d send it to him. Three weeks later, I got a letter back. It was written in his chicken scratch. He apologized for not saying goodbye. He said his father, now a truck driver, stopped one night and picked him up. He was living in Los Angeles. He said kids from Arizona were called “zoners” there, but that he’d already earned the respect of some “surfer dudes.” The last line said, “See, I told you he was coming for me.” He didn’t once ask about me. I went to our bush in Paradise Valley Park and read it a few more times. Each misspelled word made me miss him even more. I looked at Black Tail. I studied the men and rubbed my crotch. I even ordered one of the tapes from the back, which, with a simple money order, was surprisingly easy to do for a minor. It arrived in only a few days. I popped it in our VCR when no one was home. There were no opening credits. The screen just went from static to a scene with a Black man and a white woman. I thought of Sterling. I watched it a few times, hiding the tape in my bottom dresser drawer like a weapon afterward. Eventually, I just threw it away in a dumpster behind a mall.
