Pedro helped me back out the bathroom too after I was all dressed and washed and the room stopped twirling as much. We went back in the living room and sat on the purple couch with the stripe cat. He was a nice cat. I mean she. I said, “That soccer game is still going?” And Pedro said, “This is a different soccer game.” Then he looked at me in the eyes and I looked back. He kissed me but he didn’t pounce on me this time.
Thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph I am not a virgin no more. That’s the truth. I mean the truth for real. And it didn’t hurt like everybody says. I guess I been poked up in there by so many doctors there’s nothing left to hurt on. I wish Tía Nene was here so I could tell her but she’d probably kill me if she knew. I do have a couple questions though.
Okay, here is my first question. How big is a bicho suppose to be? Pedro’s bicho was . . . I wanna say . . . five inches? Is that okay? Could’ve been longer but I didn’t really see it too much. And what the hell was that crinkled-up hairy bag of whatever hanging down back there? Do not tell me that was the balls. Is that what they talking about when they say “He got balls” or “He got sack” or “She’s a ball breaker”? If that thing was really the balls, then I don’t get why they is such a big deal. Males have been making out like balls is the greatest thing ever and anybody who don’t got ’em is missing out but I’m glad I don’t got one of those hanging between my legs. I liked the bicho, I guess, but no thank you on that crinkly bag of somethin’ somethin’. Keep it.
You know what I liked though? The part when he put his thing up my punani and then he kept pulling it out and pushing it back in and pulling it out and pushing it back in a little more each time? It made me feel real, real, real, like, good, you know? I was sorry he stopped doing it so quick. But I guess he ejackalated because he was done. So that was that.
Pedro went to sleep but I got back in my chair and went to the kitchen and cleaned myself up with paper towels and sink water. I woke him up then and he drove me back to the bus. He stayed with me when I bought my ticket back to Chicago and then he bought us hot dogs. He asked me what Chicago was like. I said, “It’s great. And it’s big. Bigger than Milwaukee.” He said maybe he’d come visit me sometime and even though I would like to see him again I gave him my address where I lived with Tía Nene. I didn’t tell him I lived in a institution for disabled crip youth. I didn’t tell him about all the bad things that happen there. I didn’t say that I didn’t have no place to go but back there and it was already 7:20 at night and I was afraid of what they might do to me to get even for my running away. Even if I told him he wouldn’t know how it really is. Maybe when I’m eighteen and I can be award of myself I’ll find him on Facebook or maybe I won’t.
I told him he better go ’cause my bus was coming soon but I was ready for the boy to go, so he kissed me good-bye and I kissed back.
I lay my head against the bus window. I watched the white lines on the street get swallowed up by the bus and no matter how many white lines this bus goes past, there’s always more white lines. Like how sometimes you’re leaving one place and going someplace else but you’re really in the same place all along? Not getting no farther away, not getting more closer.
And I was thinking about them cows earlier and the plants growing and the barns and all of a sudden it hit me—this must be country. I wonder if Jimmie ever been as far as this. I wonder if she’s worried about me and thinks I might be kidnapped.
I tried to think about other things, like not being a virgin and how much I liked kissing. I liked laying down with a boy with no clothes on and our arms around each other. Like he was my special person and I was his. I thought about getting offa this bus and turning around and going back to his house and him saying how happy he was that I come back and he loved me and would I stay with him. But I knew he wouldn’t say that. And I knew I wouldn’t get offa the bus.
The tears started falling outta my eyes and plopping down on my hands in my lap. The bus was so loud I didn’t have to worry about nobody hearing me.
When I was at Juvie, they made me go see Patricia Flowers before I got out. She said, “How you feeling?” and oh my God, my tears just let go. Those bitches was just falling outta my eyes and they would not stop. Patricia just sat there and said, “I know, I know,” and I go, “You don’t know!” and she still stayed by my side till my tears finally dried up and stopped flooding the whole damn place. She said how all this is extrahard without my tía Nene by my side which was the exact thing I had been thinking of but I go, “I don’t wanna go there! I don’t wanna go there!” but she said, “You gots to go there. You’re not never gonna ever feel better if you don’t let yourself go there.” And after we talked some more, in a little bit of a way, I did feel my heart wasn’t weighing me down like it had a hunk of brick stuck in it.
But I’m not crying about my tía this time. I mean, I am? But I’m not. Everything is all mixed up in me tonight.
I must have fell to sleep ’cause when I opened my eyes there were cars again and lights along the highway and signs. At the Megabus station I asked the way to the Halsted bus and the man said I had to take a bus just to get to the Halsted bus.
When I got offa the Halsted bus, there wasn’t nobody in the streets. Every time my chair rolled from one square of sidewalk to the next you could hear it. Ba-dump. Ba-dump. It made my heart hurt thinking where I had to go back to.
ILLC looks real dark from the street. One little light in the lobby but nobody in there, not even the security guard.
I stopped at my little tree I was attached to that day. I thought about my friends. Cheri. Teddy. Mia. When I looked up I saw that somebody had come into the lobby. It wasn’t the security guard.
It was Jimmie.
Acknowledgments
There are a few people who read at least one draft and gave me the confidence I needed to continue: my irreplaceable sister, Karen Nussbaum; my faithful playwrighting agent, Peter Hagan; and my treasured friends Jeanine Mt. Morick, Jim Charlton, Judy Dennis, Carolyn Gordon, Carrie Sandahl, Janet Leder, Aly Patsavas, Ethan Young, Tom Wilson, Jessica Palmert, Steve Remke, Sheila O’Donnell, and Tim Jones-Yelvington. Thanks, also, to Fannie Outlaw.
If I was a person who liked tattoos, I would tattoo Denisa Clark on one arm and Johnny Garcia on the other. Thank you both for your friendship, and for sharing your stories.
Many thanks to Lisa Koslowsky, Doug Williams, Rodney Estvan, and Deborah Kaplan for helping me understand how their pieces of the System work. I hope I succeeded in representing the oppressive reality for thousands of disabled kids in Illinois, even if I didn’t go into detail about the good people who work every day to protect the rights of those kids.
To Access Living, past and present: I’m only one of countless people who would not be able to imagine my life without you. Thanks for letting me print up a couple hundred articles and studies about institution-based abuse, even though it wasn’t exactly my job. Thank you to the Empowered Fe Fes, and a big shout out to the tireless deinstitutionalization advocates who have helped liberate hundreds of people from the claws of the System in Illinois.
Thank you, Melanie Jackson, for taking a chance on me; Rosellen Brown and Margot Livesey for picking me; and Kathy Pories for being steadfast and stubborn.
To Barbara Kingsolver, for whom artistry and social conscience are seamless, thank you for your acknowledgment of me.
Thanks to my beloved family, most of whom read drafts without my even asking. Thanks to Jack Arlook for being my first reader, as well as Ira, Gene, and Norie Arlook. Thanks to Jack and Margaret Nussbaum, and to the three graces, Miri, Leah, and Elise Nussbaum. For their ongoing support, thanks to Julie Nussbaum, Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bob Berns, and Hernan Velarde. And to my hard-working and hilarious mother, Annette Nussbaum, who would have been so proud.
Dad, thank you for being such a healthy specimen. You can’t imagine the pure pleasure it’s given me to share this with you.
And to my darling daughter, Taina Rodriguez de Velarde, thank yo
u for letting me call you at work every day to pick your brain for Spanish words, particularly insults and curses. You are my muse.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2013 by Susan Nussbaum.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-267-5
Good Kings Bad Kings Page 21
