Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  As soon as other kids found out about my slug phobia, they would chase me down the beach, flinging them, cackling at my girly screams. Some mornings I would run into the kitchen and have a meltdown after having pulled up my blinds: The giant slugs liked to climb up my bedroom windows, as if begging to be let in. My father, eating his breakfast at the table, would frown, unamused by the heights of my hysteria.

  I had a new friend named Ryan Smith, who didn’t seem to care about my squeamish, girly proclivities. He was a kind child, and had befriended me on my first day of fourth grade. Outdoorsy and hilarious, he was the second-youngest of a peaceful Catholic family who ran an apple orchard and lived in a log cabin they’d built themselves. It was a playground in the woods almost from another time. We’d stage talent shows in the summer and ice-skate in the winter when the pond froze over. They made cider, had dogs, and didn’t watch TV except perhaps an old movie during the weekends on their sputtering VCR.

  Spending the night on a Saturday could be dicey. I’d end up getting dragged to Mass the next morning, an exercise in profound boredom. Sometimes I wished I could partake in Communion so I could at least eat something. Father O’Neill made up for the snoozy Sundays with his eclectic family-friendly VHS collection, which he had in his house that adjoined the church. It was mostly stuff from the ’60s and ’70s. I got my first great education in film from those tapes. Ryan and I would go over and watch Vincent Price mince around in The Abominable Dr. Phibes or Madeline Kahn chew the scenery in What’s Up, Doc?

  When we were at my house, Ryan and I became video game fanatics, staying up all night with wide, glazed eyes, staring at the huge pixels of my brand-new Nintendo I’d received for my eighth birthday. Occasionally we still played with my He-Man collection, but we knew we were getting too old for such things: It wasn’t as cool to pretend.

  I was in between selves, not a little kid anymore. Impatient, I longed to experience culture with more mature themes. I wanted to go to the movie house, no matter what was playing. Every Friday, as we drove down Main Street, I pressed my nose to the car window and tried to make out what was on the theater’s faded marquee. They’d stick a computer printout of the title and two showtimes behind the scratched Plexiglas.

  A friend of mine and his mom who had cosmopolitan taste took me to see my first R-rated film, Working Girl. At the opening shot of New York and the Statue of Liberty, my heart soared while Carly Simon wailed “Let the River Run.” I too could be privy to stories about the complications of adults. As the credits rolled, I realized that so many of the movies that I’d been watching before this had been absolute swill. That Bobcat Goldthwait movie with the talking horse? Garbage! Ernest Goes to Camp? Baby stuff! When I heard people actually saying fuck out loud, or glimpsed a man’s bare ass and thrusting hips, I felt an inexplicable pang, a desire to be older, to one day inhabit the roles that I saw played on the screen.

  I became a true movie hound. In the sixth grade, as I was leaving the theater, a classmate’s mother spotted me and approached me with a curious look. “Funny seeing you at Crimes and Misdemeanors,” she said.

  I was working my way through meatier books now. My sister Sheryl had left a dog-chewed paperback of Stephen King’s Tommyknockers lying around. I would squirrel it away behind the couch in the den and read for hours, possessed by its horrific imagery. I had already learned to be careful: A girl in my class had caught me reading If There Be Thorns by V. C. Andrews in the school library. She seized it and chucked it away from me, turned to one of her girlfriends, and said disgustedly, “Oh my God, he’s a fucking gay.”

  MY NEWFOUND DISCERNING TASTES WERE satiated when my parents went off-island. They often left one of my sisters in charge. Windi would immediately have six-packs and sullen boyfriends strewn around the house like dirty socks. In exchange for keeping my mouth shut, I’d be allowed to watch the Playboy channel, which for me, in 1987, was the pinnacle of entertainment.

  The Playboy channel was my heaven. I didn’t find it sexually appealing, but I was blown away by the upscale-trash aesthetic. The living centerfolds were a nonstop breast parade, champagne streams of women with perfectly feathered hair, framed overhead shots of freshly tanned bodies in David Hockney–blue swimming pools. They were the epitome of decadent glamour, preening with their arching backs and oversize sunglasses, wet tits in the air, licking their glistening candy-apple lips. There was never a woman in the pool without her high heels on.

  I got the courage one day to confide in Joseph Alred, a jock-boy with a flattop haircut from the mythical fifth grade above me. Thinking we were friends, I told him that I’d been watching Playboy at home when my folks were gone. Within seconds, he turned on me and threatened that if I didn’t give him money, he was going to tell my parents. The thought of my mom and dad finding out suddenly made what was so colorful and inspiring seem dirty. I felt the bloodless sink of shame and fear and gave Joseph a little bit of cash every week for the rest of the school year.

  If Joseph Alred was treating me like a puny nerd, it wasn’t for my lack of trying to be one. I was thrilled when my vision went bad, since I had always wanted to wear glasses. Thinking I was projecting refinement instead of weakness, I would wear garish button-up shirts and sometimes a tie, and I begged my mom to buy me a briefcase in which I carried notebooks full of my meandering, unfinished stories. I tried to share one with my favorite icy librarian and was a little hurt when she refused to read it. “You can’t just give me notebook pages,” she said. “You need to type this stuff out.”

  Adults were the stimulation I was looking for, or at least they understood what I wanted to talk about. The lady at the used-book store allowed me to loiter by the register and gab with her between customers. The clerks at the drugstore humored me in my musings almost daily, as I talked a blue streak about celebrity gossip and current events. I was a funny kid and loved making people laugh, using shock value if nothing else did the trick. My friends’ mothers were still a special target. Some moms kept me at arm’s length, which I simply viewed as a challenge to my wooing powers. Others seemed to enjoy my company as I recounted the blow-by-blow of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL Club scandal, or when Zsa Zsa Gabor slapped a police officer in Beverly Hills. My dad was especially mystified by my Zsa Zsa fascination. He called her a phony. I didn’t care what she was, I just wanted to order her exercise video for senior citizens.

  My sixth-grade teacher, Sheila Dyer, was an earthy, feminist hippie. She had long brown hair and glasses, and didn’t shave her armpits, to the horror of the class. Sometimes she and I would stay in the classroom at lunch, where our private asides made me laugh so hard I’d snort milk out of my nose. If it was feigned interest, she had me fooled. My elaborate journal entries and stories merited her critical but thoughtful feedback. For Halloween, just because I knew it would crack Ms. Dyer up, I dressed as Geraldo Rivera with a broken nose (he had been fortuitously smacked by a flying chair on his own show while hosting a panel of KKK members). I wonder now if she felt a little sorry for me. I had morphed into an awkward-looking boy in pink glasses with a shrill giggle and campy gestures. Yes, my mother let me pick out pink glasses.

  There was occasional tension between Ms. Dyer and me. The boundaries would blur and I’d go too far by drawing unflattering cartoons of her boyfriend, or telling her she was old. I knew I could make her mad, but our tiffs remained private. Neither of us wanted the bother of exposing our exclusive relationship. A precious thing, at least to me. I felt that, more than anyone else, she understood my unsettled fascinations. Our friendship was the first time I really got a taste of what it would feel like to be autonomous, a grown-up. It made me care less what other kids thought of me: Her approval was all that mattered. I guess she was my first muse.

  Those late elementary school years were plagued by my sisters’ getting into trouble. When we moved to the island, they were sent to spend the last two years of their secondary education at a boarding school in Tacoma. Windi got expelled for sneaking out
and drinking while underage and returned to the island to finish out her senior year. I’d now sit in my bedroom, frightened of the mascara-streaked battles that raged in the kitchen between her and my once-jubilant mom. The phone would ring in the middle of the night: Windi wouldn’t be coming home. “We’re here if you need us,” I’d hear my dad say. He sounded resigned.

  I couldn’t piece together what exactly was going on, but the unease bled into my school hours. Two lowlifes in my class, Matt McCutcheon and Darren Lawson, approached me one day at lunchtime. “Your sister is a whore,” they said. With half of a sandwich hanging out of my mouth, I felt sick, knowing what they meant, but not sure what they were talking about. I was too frightened to fight back. Matt would shove me or call me a pussy given any opportunity. For years I fantasized about his death. A decade later, when he drove off a cliff and actually died, I was both surprised and not surprised that I felt nothing.

  Windi soon vanished from our lives. She moved in with her townie boyfriend before the school year was over. He was a stranger, and I hated him. Sometimes, from the car, I would spot Windi in town, walking with him down a side street, wearing a fleece-lined denim jacket and smoking. I felt so lonely seeing her like that, unable to understand why she had left. The division of our family seemed pointless.

  My other sister, Sheryl, now at college, started struggling as well. My parents became preoccupied with her antics and assumed that both my sisters were alcoholics. In retrospect, I don’t think it was alcoholism, just unhappiness. We had moved to this serene island, envisioning a peaceful and easy life surrounded by beauty. But it was out of our grasp. The bones we needed to hold each other had fractured, and when we attempted to reset them, they broke again. Why couldn’t our lives be more like those of Ryan Smith’s family, with their mellow evenings and log cabin?

  Those years were a blur of rehab centers and counselors’ offices off-island, to which I’d be dragged along. They were depressing, sterile places, followed by nights in nearby motels, where I shared a double room with my parents. One time we got on the 6 a.m. ferry, picked up Windi from rehab midday, and had a dismal Thanksgiving lunch at Denny’s.

  On these bleak trips I stayed preoccupied with books. I’d shut myself in the bathroom with Piers Anthony and a hot bath. Writers like William Sleator and John Saul helped me pass the hours in the backseat of the car, waiting for a therapy session to end. I’d sit outside on the late-night ferry, seeing nothing but blackness, with only the sound of the engine and lapping water.

  As distracted as my parents became, I never felt ignored. My mother would come into my room and embrace me after some scorched-earth battle, tell me she was sorry and that she loved me. At the time it felt like my family was really fucked-up. But really we were just normal people. I think everyone was trying to do their best.

  SOMEWHERE AROUND AGE TWELVE, MY features started running—dripping—off my face. No hair under the pits yet, but my eyes were drifting wider, my brow getting heavier, my face all follicles and pores. As bad as my vision was, I was blessed, by way of my glasses, with a new kind of mutant sight and attention to detail. The crooks of boys’ arms, the hollow of a collarbone, the thickness of some flexed calves were all magnified to me, would make me perspire new kinds of oils. And when I glanced at my reflection, I knew there was no way around it: I wasn’t lookin’ as cute no more.

  The next few years we jumped around, a lot. Back and forth from Arizona to the island, at the mercy of my father’s whims. He had started designing and building amphibious boats, so called because they could be operated on both land and water. At the end of the sixth grade, my parents told me we were moving back to Mesa. My sister Windi, having reconciled with the family, was going to follow us down and get a job and her own apartment. I was going to miss my lunchtime ruminations with Ms. Dyer and sneaking hard cider with Ryan Smith, but I would be back on the island in the summers.

  Mesa had grown into what seemed like a metropolis, but maybe that was just because we’d been living on a remote island for the last three years. It was all Blockbuster video stores and heavily air-conditioned frozen yogurt shops with that chalky smell of rainbow sprinkles. We moved into a one-story house in a cul-de-sac with a dusty backyard, where the nearby public schools were much larger than what I was used to. To be a new kid among thousands was scary, so my mom and I found a modest junior high called Redeemer Christian School.

  We were Christians—at least, my mom was—but we had never been super-religious. My dad was not a churchgoer, and my mom’s pluck took precedence over any hellfire-and-brimstone talk. A Christian junior high seemed less stressful; its small size was inviting. I figured the inevitable junior high drama might be more manageable with only twenty-five kids in each grade.

  There was a tepid dress code: Girls had to wear skirts and guys collared shirts. The boys got around this by wearing T-shirts with logos, then donning a collared short-sleeved shirt over them. I was mortified by PE. We had to play basketball as either shirts or skins. I was embarrassed to take mine off since I was so small and skinny.

  Classes were what I imagine homeschooling to be like. First thing in the morning, we had Bible study, which was mostly combing through the savagery of the Old Testament, slaughtered babies and lambs, locusts, people being stoned to death. All of our textbooks were Christian-based, and unintentionally hilarious. There was a poster on the wall with a caveman standing next to a brontosaurus that read, MAN AND DINOSAURS: LIVING IN HARMONY.

  Evolution and secular entertainment were generally frowned upon, but above all else, homosexuality was the greatest transgression. AIDS was a punishment, described often. We had all kinds of conversations in class about how gay people liked to do horrible and disgusting things, like defecate and pee on one another, spread disease, and recruit children. Still, it didn’t feel like something to revolt against. After all, I didn’t totally realize yet that they were talking about me. I would just try my best to make sense of it and agree—yeah, gays were super gross. Ew.

  At Redeemer, there was a certain social hierarchy. I knew I was thought of as a nerd by the other kids, mostly because of how I looked and because of my love for books. But I was still cooler and more world-wise than some of the sheltered Christian kids on the periphery. The ones from the strictest families were on the bottom rung, unable to contribute to any conversations on secular culture. I liked straddling this line of not being the most popular, but not being a reject, either.

  I wasn’t shy, often piping up just for a laugh and relishing it when eyes and ears were on me. I felt urges to jump up on my desk at school and shake my arms and sing. I wanted to put on costumes, wail into paper-towel rolls, and stomp my feet. Energetic and hyper, I ran around at lunchtime, harassing kids with performative shit-stirring. One day a girl a year older, in the eighth grade, broke down in front of one of the teachers and cried. She pointed at me, her face crinkling into a sob. “He’s terrible, can’t you see?” As if she were the only one to recognize that I was a monster. “He’s just so . . . so happy!”

  Once a week, we had an art class taught by a glamorous twenty-six-year-old woman named Jennifer Lebert. I could tell she was perfect woman-friend material and latched onto her right away. It was only a matter of time before my parents went out of town, and of course I nominated Jennifer and her husband, Mat, to stay at my house and look after me. Jennifer and I became close, and though she was a devout Christian, her outlook never felt judgmental or stifling to me. She was one of the cool ones. We both were enamored with the movies and always had tons to gossip about, and she introduced me to her favorite bands—OMD, the Psychedelic Furs, and the Cure.

  Jennifer and Mat worked multiple jobs. In the daytime he sold mobile homes in Mesa. At night he worked in a themed restaurant called Bobby McGee’s, where he waited tables and had to dress up like a quack doctor named Mel Practice, or Dracula. They were also salespeople for Amway, which seemed to me to be a pyramid scheme that hawked everything from toothpaste to vacuum cleaner
s to their friends and neighbors.

  When I was with Jennifer, we talked about pop culture and went places I could never just go with a friend my own age. The world around us felt a little looser: We ate at drive-thrus and riffled through record store bins, saw horror movies at the dollar theater, drank Big Gulps, had sleepovers, and stayed up late watching warbly VHS tapes.

  I dreamed about having real guy friends, but such a thing seemed impossible. I thought I wanted a brother. I already had a half brother, of course, but he was twenty years older and we didn’t have much in common. Sometimes Jennifer’s husband, Mat, would try to take me out to do manly things, like attend an air show or go golfing. But it was obvious that I was distracted, bored, and wishing I were elsewhere.

  One evening my mom took me to Fiesta Mall and I wandered into a B. Dalton Bookseller. I was browsing around in the horror section when a young man in his early twenties appeared beside me and asked me about the book I was looking at, a pulpy Dean Koontz paperback. We began talking writers, about whom we loved and the books we hadn’t read yet. He picked one I recommended, Curfew by Phil Rickman, and thanked me. I watched from the other side of the store as he bought it and left.

  During the car ride home with my mom, I was imbued with a brand-new sadness. Bereft, I knew I’d never see that guy again. Here was a grown man who was interested in the things I had to say, and familiar with the writers I rattled off. Now he was gone, never to be seen again. I watched the church parking lots and fast-food joints fly by. A wave of grief passed through me. It might have been the first time I felt my heart break.